post-war ba sing se bimbo headcanons

so zuko becomes the firelord, and jin and jet think it’s hilarious. he’s so good at it. he’s so charismatic. they’re like “who the hell is this guy? when did he get mature and responsible???” and song’s like “when zuko wasn’t doing stupid shit, he was stopping you two from doing stupid shit, i saw this coming a mile away.”

jin joins the kyoshi warriors, and is overwhelmed by all the pretty girls she’s working with, but for the most part it becomes a sisterhood. she will forever and always have a severe crush on suki, however, and really, can you blame her? so when suki reciprocates, jin writes song a four-page essay about it.

anyway, when zuko asks the warriors to come to the capital, obviously jin’s there, too. jet and song show up almost immediately after jin does.

“what, you two are hanging out without us now?” song asks them accusatorily. “it’s not fair that only you get to see jin, zuko.”

“yeah,” jet says. “and i used to see zuko shirtless a few times a week. and i thought i was lucky! now jin’s a kyoshi warrior and she gets to see it every day?”

“she does not!” says zuko. “yeah,” says jin, while shaking her head the opposite.

attempts on zuko’s life are about as common as rain showers, so song starts testing basically everything he eats with some of her chemicals. every time she finds something insidious, she tracks down every link in the chain that got the food to him, and finds a way to rectify the situation. she doesn’t trouble zuko with this, because he’s got enough going on. also, he probably maybe wouldn’t approve of her methods.

(song is not inherently violent, but when it comes to her family, she’s downright vicious).

jet wants to get in on the action, but between song’s disarming sweetness and the kyoshi warrior’s intimidation, zuko’s basically protected. what he isn’t, is good with people.

zuko can make grand dramatic speeches all day long, but when it comes to the council, or local government officials, or merchants, or literally even jet, he’s the same awkward kid jet met on the boat to ba sing se.

“you are never going to make it as firelord.” jet tells him from the couch he’s lounging on while he watches zuko practice a very basic interaction in the mirror.

“okay, fuck you, too.” zuko says miserably.

“sorry, i wasn’t clear,” jet says, standing beside zuko. “you are never going to make it as firelord without me.”

jet tries in vain to get zuko to lie better, to present himself differently, to deceive just a little bit, but it just isn’t happening. zuko doesn’t even want to lie, he doesn’t want to be like his father and azula, so they take a different approach.

instead, jet teaches him how to spot liars, and how to play the game. it’s basic stuff, like let silence linger because they’ll want to fill it if they’re afraid you don’t believe them. ask them bizarre questions so they overcorrect. if they’re complimenting you too much, they’re trying to deceive you.

to jet, it’s survival. to zuko, it’s like a whole world has opened up he never knew about. he hangs on to jet’s every word, and at the end, he asks that jet join him in council meetings, naming him an ambassador from the earth kingdom.

this is how jet discovers that he’s AMAZING at politics. he can’t believe how easy it is. he considers taking it up as a hobby when he gets back to the earth kingdom.

“you can’t do politics as a hobby,” zuko says.

“why not?” jet says. “it’s just fun. it’s not what i’m meant to be doing forever though.”

“do you have a mysterious job back in the earth kingdom none of us know about?” asks jin.

“yes,” says song, irritable from today’s batch of poison discoveries, “he’s working full-time as a little bitch.”

the more meetings jet attends, the more he wonders if politics really is for what he’s meant. arguing and debating delights him and, unlike the exhausted zuko, he leaves the debates feeling energized. but it just feels so bureaucratic, so useless compared to what he did during the war.

he’s so torn about it that he finally asks song for advice.

“i don’t know anything about politics,” she says tiredly. he’s playing idly with her hair after she’s had a long day of Keeping Zuko Alive. “why are you asking me?”

“because you don’t hold back,” jet tells her. “because you let me know when i’ve gone too far.”

song’s glad it’s dark in the lounge, because she can’t believe she’s blushing.

“well,” she says finally. “what would you be in it for?”

“what do you mean?” he says. “i just like it.”

“do you like the attention?” song asks. “are you just interested in the drama of it all? or do you want to make a difference?”

“i want to make a difference,” he says confidently. “i want to help the earth kingdom.”

“well, then, there’s your answer,” song says.

“yeah,” jet agrees. “no politics for me.”

“wait, what?” song asks him, because how did he reach that conclusion?

“it’s just smooth talking and paperwork. it’s not gonna help the earth kingdom,” jet tells her. “i’m not selling out.”

“is that what you think zuko’s doing?” she asks.

“of course not,” jet says, rolling his eyes. “but he’s also the firelord. that’s different.”

“and he’s your best friend,” she reminds him. “and you also happen to be on good terms with the avatar and the leaders of the southern water tribe, so you know you have influential people who will hear you out. if you want to make a difference, this is probably the best way.”

he’s quiet for a while. he almost looks disappointed.

“not every battle is on the battlefield, jet,” song says gently. “it’s not as glamorous, or as dangerous. it’s tedious and difficult and boring. but it’s what’s left, after the war.”

“i guess that’s the thing,” jet says sadly. “i don’t know who i am without the war.”

“i do,” song says with so much sincerity jet almost blushes. almost. he’s still, like, cool.

if they fall into a routine where song fixes his hair into something presentable for council meetings and jet forces her to take a break and enjoy the sunshine once in a while, zuko and jin don’t feel it’s necessary to comment.

for like three days.

“you stole my boyfriend,” zuko accuses song after catching her and jet kissing. the fact that sokka’s napping with his head in zuko’s lap as he says so doesn’t seem to faze him.

“you stole my ostrich horse,” she says, for the last time ever, “so now we’re even.”

“what’s with you and guys with weird facial hair?” jin asks as she stuffs her face with fire flakes, her new favorite treat. “first haru and now jet?”

“haru?” jet squeaks.

“i liked haru’s moustache,” song says thoughtfully. “i thought it made him look mature.”

“at least if jet grew a moustache i’d understand what everyone sees in him,” sokka says sleepily. “no offense.”

“you’re just mad i kissed zuko first,” huffs jet.

jet stops shaving that week. everyone notices.

when song and jet finally prepare to go back to the earth kingdom, jet privately asks zuko if it’s true that he and aang are considering founding a city that unites the nations. zuko tells him it is.

“well, i want in. whenever that is,” he says, and jet and zuko hug.

song and her mother open up a hospital and sanctuary that specifically caters to displaced families. jet reunites with longshot and smellerbee, and they drift around but tend to come back to the sanctuary. they often go out on missions to try and reunite families. it’s not quite fighting, and it’s not quite peace, so it’s a good transition for jet and his freedom fighters.

eventually, things slow down and so does jet. he starts walking around the village they’re located in without his weapons. a child asks song where she got the scars on her leg, and when she explains it was a firebender, the child says “oh, did he get in trouble?” song laughs and laughs, because for the first time in years, there are children who don’t know war.

jin doesn’t stay as a kyoshi warrior forever, but she does decide to settle down on kyoshi. she never really wanted the dangerous life, she just wanted some adventure and sort of stumbled into the chaos of jet and song and zuko. the quiet island is perfect for her. she still stirs up trouble once in a while though.

“COME GET YOUR IDIOT SHE TRIED TO RIDE THE UNAGI.” suki writes in two identical letters, one to jet and song and one to zuko.

“okay, whatever suki tells you, i want you to know she’s lying. i DID ride the unagi and it was SICK. sokka was here recently and said someone invented an image-capture thing is that true? because if it is i want you to bring one and come here ASAP so i can do it AGAIN.” says the fervent letter from jin that arrived three days after suki’s.

jet and song arrive promptly, song laden with medical supplies and a sternly-worded letter from her mother to jin. jet brings a camera.

zuko shows up a few days later with the latest in camera technology and a photographer, as well as his one-year-old daughter. he goes all-out because this is his and izumi’s first trip together. jet grumbles about being one-upped.

“you’re the firelord, you’re gonna encourage this?” song asks him, eyes furious but voice sweet as she plays with izumi. “excuse me, song, but the war is over, i have no jurisdiction here. if an earth kingdom citizen wants to exercise her right to be a dumbass she’s more than welcome to,” says zuko in his most diplomatic voice.

“and,” he adds more gently, “i missed you guys.” song still thinks he’s being ridiculous, but she gives him a big hug anyway.

zuko has to firebend at the unagi to stop it from eating jin and song is left to mend jin’s broken arm. jet takes pictures throughout the entire thing, from her climbing onto the creature, to getting thrown, to being bandaged up and laughs the whole time. song produces a second letter written by her mother which she was instructed only to give to jin in the event she rode the unagi.

all it says in neat hand-writing is, “i told you so. now come home so i can feed you, you ridiculous child.”

“i’m 24,” pouts jin, but since she’s the youngest, the group agrees heartily with song’s mother.

the five of them go to the sanctuary, where iroh is drinking tea with song’s mother and trading stories about their new respective lives.

zuko has to return to the capital in three days, iroh’s got his tea shop to run, and jin isn’t planning on staying long because her “super hot girlfriend is doing something extremely sexy” and she has to get back soon.

“jin, please, just talk normal for once in your life,” zuko begs her, bouncing izumi on his lap. “fine,” she says, “she’s being voted in as the leader of the island and i want to be there for the ceremony.”

jet realizes it’s not often he’ll have all the people he loves in one place, and quietly asks song something important.

they get married the night before zuko and jin leave, in front of jet’s freedom fighters and song’s mother and iroh. jin and zuko stand as their maid of honor and best man. zuko cries.

for the first time in almost two decades, all of them start to feel at peace.

ty so much for this au @azenkii writing about it is one of the most enjoyable experiences haha. is this update softer than usual? yes, of course, it’s what they deserve.

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A Manifesto Against The School System

As of writing this I am a second year Public High School Teacher. I won’t be able to live with myself if I spend another year at it. Literally, I feel like a bit of a monster for deciding to finish out this school year rather than quitting right now. But we do what we must to survive, my students won’t be less oppressed because I left, and if nothing else, it gives me an opportunity to strategize about what I can do to aid in revolutionizing school because authentic alternatives to public school exist but none I have found have been intersectional enough to replace public education without excluding the kids who would most benefit from escaping the main school system here in America.

Some of the reasons I did not understand how oppressive school actually is, are that my interests and hobbies happened to align very neatly with the “core” classes, and that even though I grew up very poor and moved around a lot as a kid, we eventually settled and I went to a well funded high school that had just about any elective and/or after school club that I might be interested in trying and then some. During that time, I came to see school as a place where I could explore my passions and escape my home situation. So I figured I would love to pay it forward and go be a teacher.

I recognized at least, the privileged position I came from and decided I wanted to go learn how to teach in settings as different from my high school as possible. Which is why I went and got special permission for most of my classroom placements throughout the teaching program to be at alternative schools. In Colorado at least, alternative schools are small public schools which primarily serve students identified as “at risk”, which is shorthand for “Statistically more likely to drop out than the general population for one reason or another.”

I did not know when I asked to be placed in one, but learned within days of being there that most people that even know alternative schools exist, think of them as the places where “the bad kids” go. I realized very quickly that they are actually places filled with kids who have experienced a lot of trauma in and out of school and don’t respond to that trauma the way adults want them to respond. I came to adore kids at alternative schools because they remind me of my younger siblings.

Like my oldest brother, many of them find school mind numbingly easy and boring and have much more pressing matters to devote their mental energy to.

Like my middle brother, many of them have spent so much time around teachers who do not understand neurodivergence that have been convinced of the lie that they are weird, dumb and/or lazy and because of that, trying to participate in school is like hitting their head on a brick wall.

Like all of my brothers and my sisters, they have a ton of skills that they are brilliant at, but that are not prioritized by the school system, so they never pursue them, such as construction, music, makeup and programming.

Many, if not most of them come from living situations full of abuse and neglect and/or poverty so they don’t have the mental or emotional space to worry about much beyond survival, and not only haven’t learned how to make and achieve long term goals, but have never had the luxury of a stable enough environment for that kind of planning to be worthwhile.

All that being said, something that you only realize if you actually work in a few public alternative schools, as I have done through college and my current job, is that the name is actually an oxymoron.

What started me down the path of considering and researching all the ways school is an oppressive system, was a conversation I had with a student in my first year teaching. He was learning about chemical reactions and safety and asked me the infamous question, “Why do I have to learn about this?” to which I said “Because everything is chemicals and understanding how they can interact with one another and ways they can harm you can keep you safe when you do things like clean or cook.” To which he replied, “Well no offense but I have no idea how this shit relates to cooking and please don’t tell me because its not like I’m actually going to remember it when I am cooking, and I already know how to clean safely because of work. But you’re still going to make me learn this boring shit anyways so seriously, why do we have to learn about this?”

I paused to consider what he was asking. I had interpreted, as the system trained me to, that the question he was asking was, “what value does this knowledge hold?” But what he actually meant was “Why are you making me waste my time learning about this thing that I never asked to learn about?” So I replied, as a sort of test of my new understanding, “It’s part of the physical science curriculum the Education Department thinks is important for high schoolers to learn.” He was taken aback, “Wait, you don’t decide what stuff we learn about? What’s even the point of teachers then? Why don’t they just give us a list of all their stupid stuff they think we should know so we can get on with our lives?” He had a point and I have spent a lot of time reflecting on and growing from that conversation.

Sure, there are some key differences that make alternative schools slightly more tolerable than your standard 800-4,000 kid high school. Class sizes are smaller so students get more individualized help. We get funding to help students access things such as food, clothes, hygiene products, and healthcare and know students well enough that we actually know which kids are lacking these resources. We have slightly more leeway than traditional schools to create innovative lessons. We don’t give out homework.

But public alternative schools are still oppressive in most of the ways that the big schools are. I’m sure none of this will be a surprise to most readers, but I want you to really consider how restricted kids in public school are, how restricted you probably were in school as you read through this.

School starts early in the morning and students have to constantly shift mental gears throughout the day due to a tight schedule of constantly rotating classes and a very short lunch break. Throughout the day, bells tell students when they can’t or must move around or eat. Students have to ask when they need to go to the bathroom or get water and teachers cannot go at all outside of their plan period because students are not trusted to be in the classroom without an adult even for a few minutes. They have no control over who they share space with and very little control over their ability to leave that space if it conflicts with their needs. There is a strict dress code which disproportionately targets marginalized students. Students are expected to be sociable but not given nearly enough opportunities to actually socialize. The school keeps records of everything the student has ever gotten in trouble for, every class the student has taken, every grade they have received, their “class rank,” and every intervention program the student is part of. And like every public school, alternative schools must follow state curriculum standards and by extension, grading, data collection, and required testing. On the surface it might not seem like it, but that last point is actually the most insidious one and its the one that has followed students into remote learning during the pandemic.

According to the people who decide how schools work, there are four factors of student choice: These factors are Time, Place, Pace, and Path. For example, if I am running a unit on plate tectonics, rather than giving students a worksheet and telling them to work on it as we go through a slideshow and turn it in at the end of class, I could put them in groups, give them an online choice board of three different but roughly equivalent projects relating to plate tectonics to choose from, each with different rubrics for completion and tell them they can turn it in at any time in the next two weeks. And then instead of devoting class time to direct instruction, I would give them a variety of resources to peruse and teach them how to research more and let them choose what aspects of plate tectonics to focus on and how to present their information. Now, this is certainly a few steps in the right direction away from making kids sit in rows and listen to the teacher drone on about plate tectonics while they take notes. But it misses the most important factors of choice in my eyes, the things that I would be fired for if I actually gave them the choice about: How students spend their time and what they are allowed to prioritze.

None of this is to say that expecting kids to learn is inherently fucked up or that teaching inherently makes one an oppressive person. On the contrary, authentic teaching and learning are vital to our ability to solve our problems and grow as people. If all students were given the opportunities to spend their childhoods learning things that they were actually interested in, to explore the full breadth of knowledge that humans have compiled at their leisure without timelines or milestones except the ones they set for themselves, to socialize with people of all ages, to authentically participate in society both as learners and as educators, as leaders and as team members, the world wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be a lot less soul crushing.

Now, I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that authentic alternatives do exist.  To get you started on researching what’s out there, I recommend starting with Sudbury schools and the unschooling movement.

But unless these models somehow miraculously become a large and accepted enough presence to get government funding, or money ceases its hold on us all, the public school system will be the only one that most students, especially impoverished students, transient students, english language learners, and disabled students (especially those with profound disabilities) will have access to. Which is a damn shame and a problem I am committed to trying to figure out how to contribute to solving because those are the students whose lives would be most radically transformed for the better if they got the opportunities that these models provide.

Sides Carry On

Summary: Roman Prince will do anything to protect the life he’s found through magic. This includes enduring lectures from his best friends Logan and Patton, overcoming his evil roommate Virgil, working for the Mage, and defeating the Insidious Humdrum. His life seems to be set out for him - but things can never be easy, can they?

AO3 Link

Ch. 1 

Chapter two

Roman

I don’t think about Watford over the summers. It just isn’t good for me, so I don’t let myself.

I had to learn the hard way, of course. After my first year, I spent the entirety of summer daydreaming about all the things I’d left behind. Imagining the towers of the school, wishing for the amazing food (or really any food that doesn’t come on metal trays), remembering the magic of it all. I even became nostalgic for classes at Watford. More than any of it though, I longed for the people I’d met there - Logan, Patton, the Mage. I was terribly alone for someone surrounded by other castaway boys.

I was sick with the loss of it. Watford School of Magicks started to feel like just another fantasy of my overactive imagination. Something to make the time pass like when I’d dreamt of becoming an actor someday… Or that my parents, the real ones, would come back for me.

My mum would be an actress, obviously. And my dad would be some rugged athletic type. They would weep and plead for me to understand that they’d had no choice but to leave me. They were simply too young, and her career was on the line.

“But we always missed you, Roman,” they’d declare. “We’ve been searching for you.”  And I would forgive them, and they would take me away to their mansion hidden away behind a waterfall.

Waterfall mansion… Magickal boarding school…

They both felt like creations of my unchained whimsy in the light of day. Especially when you wake up in one bunk of eight to the room, with all the other discards.

I exhausted my memory of Watford so thoroughly that when proof of it being a reality came around with the fall, I was almost unconvinced. Even with the bus fare and papers and a note from the Mage himself right in front of me, I was scared to believe.

So now during the summers, I dedicate myself to ensuring all thoughts of my better life are locked up thoroughly. For months I shut myself away from it all, not allowing myself to miss it, or long for it. That way the World of Mages can show up as a reward for surviving the summer if it shows up at all. Which it always has, thus far.

At first, I was given the impression that eventually the Mage might allow me to spend summers at Watford, or maybe even at his side, wherever he ventures all summer long. Despite my enthusiasm for the idea, it was decided that I would be better off left with the Normals for part of the year. To allow me to be close to the language (as though anyone spoke to me away from Watford) and to keep my wits about me.

“Let hardship sharpen your blade, Roman."

I eventually realized he wasn’t talking about the Sword of Mages, which is my actual blade. He was talking about me. I’m the blade, The Mage’s sword.

I’m fairly convinced that these summers in children’s homes don’t make me any sharper. They do make me hungry though. Cause me to crave Watford like life itself.

Virgil and his side - all the old, rich families - they don’t think anyone can understand magic the way they can. They believe they are the only ones that should be trusted with it.

But no one loves magic like I do.

None of the other magicians, not my peers and not their parents, know what it’s like to live without magic at all.

Only I know.

Which is why I will do anything to ensure that it is always there for me to come home to.

***

I try not to let Watford into my thoughts when I’m away, but this year… Well, this year I failed.

After the events that occurred last year, I was shocked that the Mage even bothered paying attention to something like the end of term. Who interrupts a war to send the kids home for summer vacation?

Which isn’t to say I’m even a kid anymore. Legally, care wouldn’t have needed to keep me past sixteen, which means I could have gone off somewhere on my own. I could afford to support myself, what with my hard earned bag of leprechaun’s gold.

Still, the mage insists on keeping me in children’s homes. Shuffling me around like the ball in a cups trick. As though I would be safe wherever he decides to drop me, and the Humdrum couldn’t just summon me, the way he managed to do to me and Logan at the end of last term.

“He can summon you?! ” Logan had exclaimed as soon as we were in the clear. “And across a body of water no less. This shouldn’t be possible Roman, there is no precedent.”

“Well the next time he summons me like a half-assed squirrel demon,” I said, “ I’ll tell him so!”

Logan was unfortunate enough to have been holding me by the arm when I’d been spirited away, which is why I assume he’d been brought along. His quick thinking is the only reason either of us escaped.

“Roman,” he’d intoned on the train back to Watford that day, “this is serious.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious! I know this is serious, Logan, he’s got my fucking number.”

“How is it possible that we still know so little about him?” He fumed. “ He’s so…”

“Insidious,” I said. “Being ‘The Insidious Humdrum’, and all that.”

“This is no time for kidding around, Roman. Even you must see that this is…”

“I know, Logan”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Logan so lost for words as he was that day, trailing off and unable to keep his head on straight.

When we finally returned, the Mage heard us out, made sure we weren’t harmed and sent us on our way. Just sent us home, without a second thought.

It didn’t make any sense.

So, of course, I spent this whole summer thinking of Watford despite best efforts. Everything that had happened, and everything that might still happen… Everything that’s at stake.

All of the good things, however, were kept at bay. The good things are what hurt the most anyway.

I keep a list, of all the things I miss most, and I’m not allowed to touch it in my head until I’m about an hour from Watford. That’s when I allow myself to go over it and really feel how much I’ve missed it all before I finally get it all back.

My list of good things started when I was twelve, and it could do with having a few things crossed off of it, but that’s more difficult than one might expect.

Things I miss most about Watford:

No. 1 - Sour cherry scones

I’d never had cherry scones before Watford. I’d only been given the raisin ones, or more often the plain sort, and always the kind that were a little (or a lot) burnt.

At Watford, they have freshly baked cherry scones for breakfast every day if you so desire. Unless you sleep in and all the best foods are gone. They’re also ready for tea in the afternoon just before things like clubs and football and homework get started.

I always have tea with Logan and Patton. Even after all these years, Logan will scold us for eating the scones. “Dinner is in two hours, how much sustenance could you possibly need from now until then?” he’ll tsk at us.

Patton tried to calculate how many scones we’ve eaten since we started at Watford, once, but he got bored before he reached the answer. I suspect Logan might know. At the very least he could figure it out, but I doubt he’d indulge us with the answer if we asked for it. Maybe to better scold us.

I just can’t pass up the scones if they’re there. They’re soft and light and a little bit salty and I'm always allowed to eat them. They're a dream.

No. 2 - Logan

This spot on the list used to belong to “roast beef.” But a few years back, I decided to limit myself to one food item. Otherwise, the list turns into the food song from Oliver! , and I get so hungry that my stomach cramps.

I’m not sure that Logan should rank higher than Patton; they’re both my best friends. But Logan made the list first. He befriended me the very first week at school when he was still unsure about his enthusiastic roommate.

I didn’t know what to think of him when we met. He was a skinny little boy with light brown skin and a shock of blue hair. He wore pointy spectacles, the kind you might wear going as a witch for Halloween, and there was this giant blue ring weighing down his left hand. He was trying to help me with an assignment, and I think I just stared at him.

“I know you’re Roman Prince,” he said. “My mum told me you’d be here. She says you’re incredibly powerful, even more so than myself. I’m Logan Bunce.”

“I didn’t know someone like you could be named Logan,” I said. Stupidly.

He blinked back at me. “What do you suppose someone ‘like me’, might be named?” he’d implored, not quite yet mastering his poker face or his ‘superior’ face that I’m so familiar with now, but pulling off some combination of the two.

“I don’t know.” I didn’t know. Other boys I had met who looked like him were named Saanvi or Adit, and they definitely hadn’t had hair like his. “Saanvi?”

“Someone like me could have any sort of name, Roman,” Logan said.

“Oh. Right, my apologies.” I stuttered.

“I feel it also important to point out that we can also do whatever we desire with our hair,” he’d added, turning back to the assignment, fixing his hair away from his eyes. “I believe it’s considered impolite to stare, although different rules may apply between friends.”

“Are we friends?” I’d asked, surprised and the slightest bit in awe.

“I’m helping you with your lesson. It was my understanding that this is a thing that friends do.”

He was. He’d succeeded in helping me shrink a soccer ball to the size of a marble.

“I thought you were only helping me because I’m dumb,” I said.

“Everyone is dumb,” he’d asserted. “I’m helping you because I like you.”

It turned out that he’d accidentally turned his hair that color, trying out a new spell, and he hadn’t been able to hide it before anyone saw. He’d been too embarrassed to admit it had been a mistake. When Patton and I had realized we’d figured out how to do it ourselves in solidarity, Patton’s hair turning soft cotton candy colors of pink and light blue, and mine becoming a regal red hue.

Logan’s mum is Indian, and his dad is English. Or really they’re both English in that they’re both from London. He admitted later that his parents had wanted him to stay away from me. “My mum said that no one knew where you came from and that you may be dangerous.”

“Why didn’t you listen to her?” I asked.

“I just said, Roman, no one knew where you came from and you may have been dangerous.” To say nothing of his atrocious survival instincts, I do admire his small rebellion. I’m under the impression that his parents always wanted him to be more social than he naturally is. Making his first friend into the one person they’d ushered him away from must have felt like some small victory.

“And anyway, I couldn’t stand to watch such an awful display of magic,” he said. “You were holding your wand backward.”

I miss Logan every summer, even when I tell myself not to. The Mage doesn’t allow me to write or call anyone, but Logan still finds ways to send messages from him and Patton both. Once he’d actually possessed an old man down at the shop, the one who always forgot to put in his teeth, and he’d talked right through him. It was nice to hear from him and everything, but it was so disturbing that I asked him not to attempt it again, emergencies aside.

No. 3 - Patton

Patton came into my life a couple weeks after Logan had declared our friendship.

The Crucible had cast him and Logan in a room together, so I had a general idea of what he was like based off of Logan’s comments. Before we were formally introduced I already knew that Patton was very emotional, that he loved cookies and dad jokes, and that he would try to hug a cactus if he thought it was sad. He lived up to expectations but completely surprised me by how comforting his presence could be. His actions from anyone else would be overwhelming and likely to drive me away, but Patton overcame this by being entirely genuine.

It didn’t take five minutes for the chubby kid with his golden hair and blinding smile to worm his way into my heart.

Logan had been perplexed over why they had ended up put together. The Crucible cast roommates in a way that most pairs were compatible or could form some sort of bond. He couldn’t understand why he ended up with someone who seemed to be his polar opposite.

Patton immediately took a liking to Logan even in the face of the others obvious reluctance to any sort of bonding happening between them. That’s how we met - Patton seeking Logan out to spend time with him despite already having made friends with the majority of student in our year some way or another. And to be fair to Logan, he really did warm up to Patton rather quickly after I accepted his friendship.

I’m glad that they were put together by an outside force because, even with Patton’s ability to charm almost anyone, I don’t think they would have been close if they weren't. The Crucible definitely didn’t make a mistake with them. They balance each other out perfectly despite their bickering. The only mistake the Crucible made was putting me and Virgil Grimm-Pitch anywhere we might have to breathe the same air.

I miss Patton right along with Logan each year. Sometimes he gets Logan to send cookies along with his messages. They’re never very good, but they always make me smile.

No. 4 - The theater

I don’t get to act as much as I used to. I don’t have enough time to between all the schemes I get caught up in and going out on missions for the Mage. You just can’t reliably perform when the godforsaken Humdrum could summon you away at any moment he cares to, so I’m not in the drama club. Which means I don’t get to be in any of the plays that Watford puts on.

I do get to act though. I’m allowed time to do monologues or perform scenes if I can convince another to join me. And it’s a glorious stage: fantastic lighting, and scarlet curtains. The acoustics in there are simply divine…

Virgil is in the drama club. Of course. The villain.

He’s only a techie, but he’s part of the productions and he handles his position the way he handles everything else. Capably, with vigilance. And an absolute disdain for the world at large.

No. 5 - My school uniform

I put this on the list when I was twelve. You have to realize that when I first got my uniform, it was also the first time I’d ever had clothes that weren’t secondhand, and that fit me properly. For someone used to ratty tees and jeans that were too short on me, receiving an impeccably fitted blazer and dress pants with a tie to complete the look… Well, suddenly I felt taller. And stylish. Until Virgil walked into the room, much taller than me and confident enough to scoff at following dress codes.

There are eight years at Watford. The first and second years wear striped blazers in two shades of purple and green, with dark grey dress pants, green sweaters, and red ties.

Additionally, there is a boater hat that must be worn on the grounds until you reach sixth year. Teachers enforce this mostly to see which of us have strong enough Stay put spells to keep the wind from carrying them away. Logan always took care of mine for fear that I would end up sleeping in it should I attempt the spell.

There’s a brand new uniform waiting for me every fall when I reach our room. It will be laid out for me on my bed, clean and pressed and perfectly fitted, no matter how I’ve changed or grown.

The upper years, which is me now, wear green blazers with white piping, and red sweaters if we want them. Capes are optional, too, which I wear of course. They’re fabulous. I’ll never understand why Logan avoids them. Patton wears his sometimes, just to wrap up in it as though it's a blanket.

I like the uniform, and knowing what I’m going to wear every day. I’m not sure what I’ll end up wearing next year when my time at Watford is finished.

I had thought I would join the Mage’s Men, who have their own uniforms which look like an amalgam of Robin hood and MI6. Then the Mage told me that isn’t my path.

That’s how the Mage talks to me. “It’s not your path, Roman. Your destiny lies elsewhere.”

He wishes for me to be separate from the average, with private training and special lessons. I’m not sure he would even let me go to school at Watford at all if he weren’t headmaster there. That and he knows Watford to be the safest place for me.

If I were to let the Mage dress me after leaving Watford I might end up kitted out like a superhero. Or an actual prince.

I’m not asking anyone what I should wear after I leave. I’m eighteen. I’ll dress myself.

Or Logan and Patton will help.

No. 6 - My room

I should say “our room,” but I don’t miss the sharing-with-Virgil part of it.

Your room and your roommate get picked out for you in your first year and you don’t ever get to switch. Trust me. I’ve tried. At the very least you never have to clear out your things.

Sharing a room with someone who would like nothing more than to murder me, and has felt this way since we were eleven, is a very stressful and dismal experience.

The Crucible must have felt bad for casting Virgil and me together because we got the best room there is at Watford. Logan says it’s very unlikely that the crucible is sentient in any way, but I believe it must have felt guilty.

We live in Mummers House, on the edge of the school grounds. It’s a four and a half story building made out of stone, and our room is at the very top, located in a turret facing the moat that surrounds the school. The turret just happens to be too small for two rooms, but significantly bigger than the other student accommodations, which means we get our own en-suite.

Virgil is not a bad person to share a bathroom with. He’s in there all morning, presumably applying his eyeshadow beneath his eyes like a moron, but he’s clean. Also, he’s extremely territorial so his stuff is never in my way. Logan says our bathroom smells like cedar and bergamot, and that’s got to be Virgil for it certainly isn’t me.

No. 7 - The Mage

I also put the Mage on the list when I was twelve, and since then there have been many times that I’ve wondered if I should take him off.

For example, there was the time in sixth year, when he ignored me. Whenever I spoke to him he would send me away claiming to be in the middle of something serious.

That still happens quite often. I understand, of course, he is the headmaster. And more than that he practically runs the World of Mages, since he’s head of the Coven. It’s not like he’s my dad. He’s not my anything.

It’s just that he is the closest I’ve got to anything.

If he hadn’t come to get me I wouldn’t know who I am or anything about the World of Mages. He even still looks out for me sometimes, mostly when I’m least likely to pay attention. When he does have time for me, to actually talk, it makes me feel completely grounded. I fight better when he’s around. And think better. Somehow, when I’m with him, I can buy into the things he’s always told me. I can believe that I’m the most powerful magician ever to face the World of Mages.

I even believe, just for a while, that so much power is a good thing, or at least that it will be. Someday. That I’ll get my shit together eventually and solve more problems than I cause.

The Mage, coincidentally, is the only one allowed to reach me over the break.

No. 8 - Magic

Not my magic, as that doesn’t ever leave me and doesn’t actually give me any comfort.

What I miss is being around magic. The casual, ambient sort of magic that comes from being with magicians who don’t know any other way of life. People casting spells in the hallways and throughout lessons. Someone sending a plate of sausages down the dinner table like it’s bouncing on wires.

It isn’t actually a world of its own, the World of Mages. There aren’t any magical cities or villages inhabited solely by those with magic. Magicians are spread out around the world just like any other group of people, which is supposedly safer. That’s what Logan’s mum said anyway, that it prevents us being too far removed from mundanity the way the fairies did. The fairies found it tedious dealing with the rest of the world and so they wandered into the woods for a couple centuries and lost their way back.

Which makes Watford the only place that magicians live together unless they’re related I guess. Social clubs for magicians exist, and there are parties and social gatherings, but Watford remains the only place where we’re all together all the time. I think that may be why people have been coupling up like nobodies business in the last few years. Apparently not meeting your spouse at Watford could mean ending up alone.

When I’m alone, magic becomes something personal and burdensome. It’s a heavy secret.

But at Watford, magic is just the air that we breathe. Magic makes me a part of something bigger, as opposed to setting me apart the way it does for three quarters of the year.

No. 9 - Picani and the goats

I started helping Picani the goatherd in second year. For a while, hanging out with the goats was pretty much my favorite thing. (Which Virgil had a field day with.) Picani is the nicest person at Watford. He’s younger than the teachers and surprisingly powerful for somebody who decided to spend his life taking care of goats.

“I don’t think power has anything to do with it,” Picani would say. “You don’t make someone play thrashcanball just because they’re tall.”

“I think you meant basketball.” Living at Watford does leave you a bit out of touch. Logan’s mum did have a point about not removing ourselves from society.

“Same difference. I’m not a soldier, so I don’t see why I should have to fight for a living because I can throw a punch.” I don’t think Picani has punched anyone in his life.

The Mage claims we’re all soldiers, so long as you have an ounce of magic in you. He says that is what's dangerous about the old ways, having magicians treat magic as something they don’t have to protect. Feeling entitled to magic, or using it as a toy.

Picani doesn’t have a dog for the goats. He just uses his staff. I’ve seen him turn the whole herd with a wave of his hand. He’d started teaching me, even, how to pull the goats back one by one; how to make them all feel at once that they’d gone too far. I even helped with the birthing one spring.

I don’t get to spend time with Picani often anymore.

He and the goats remain on the list though. I like stopping to think of them for a minute.

No. 10 - The Wavering Wood

I should take this one off the list.

Fuck the Wavering wood.

Ch. 3

Survey #473

“please don’t make any sudden moves  /  you don’t know the half of the abuse”

Who are the 3 people you love the most? My mom, Sara, and Girt. Last person you slept in the same bed with? Sara. When is the last time you took a picture of yourself? It's been quite a long time. When was your first kiss? March of 2012. Have you recently been sick? No. Don't jinx it, especially these days. What song are you listening to? A slowed down version of "Heathens" by twenty one pilots. I REALLY like it. Do you drink soda often? Every day. :x Would you ever move somewhere like Hawaii? NOOOOOOO. I would NEVER survive living in the tropics. Have you ever had to call 911? Why? Twice for my mom. Once we thought she was having a heart attack, and the second time she had such bad abdominal pain that she was almost entirely immobilized. It was that day we found out about the cancer. Do you get out a lot? God no. Name 3 things you really like about yourself (not physical). I have a lot of empathy, I love and care a lot about animals, and I care a lot about what other people feel and always wanna make people feel better. Name 3 things you hate about yourself (not physical). My anxiety is #1, then there's how lazy I can be, and how I jump to conclusions. Would you ever consider having an abortion? If I was raped, it was ectopic (that barely even counts as one, though...), or it greatly endangered my life, yes. In which state/country were you born? North Carolina, U.S.A. Have you ever had to be put on medicine for a mental disorder? Yeah, quite a lot... I've gone through probably around three dozen different psych meds since middle school. White chocolate or milk chocolate? Milk. I can eat white chocolate in small doses, but it's generally too sweet for me. Have you ever been to an amusement park out of state? Yeah, Disney World in Florida. Would you consider yourself a crafty person? No. I'm much better at putting stuff on paper than creating stuff with my hands. What would you say is your favorite color of all time? Baby pink! Have you ever been responsible for someone’s death? Y E E S H no. Do you ever spend the night with your significant other? Not yet. We're still iffy about sleeping in the same spot though because of my sleep apnea nightmares. My new mask seems to be working great, though; I haven't had a nightmare in like a week (and keep in mind they're usually every single night), I'm just WAY too scared to lash out at him in my sleep. I need a longer period of proof it's functioning well. Do you know a lot about serial killers? No. Have the police ever been looking for you? Yes, actually. One time when my sisters, a friend, and I were at the beach, we went walking by the shore at night, after we thought we told our parents we were going. Apparently, we didn't, or they didn't hear us, because my mom was an absolute collapsing wreck and called the police to search for us. We got back to the hotel so confused, and I'll never forget how Mom was crying. Where do you get most of your accessories from? I wanna say Hot Topic? Do you cuss more than anyone else you know? Yes, actually. Have there ever been any serial killers around your hometown? Idk. Did your parents live in a different country before you were born? No. What’s something you’ve experienced that very few others have? I'd say going to a psych hospital five or six times isn't exactly common. I am so fucking glad those days are over. Do you know anyone who’s related to a current or former world leader? Not to my knowledge, no. Do you do your own taxes, or do you hire a professional? I don't have taxes. Do you have a home security system? No, but damn do I want one. What’s something you don’t think people take seriously enough? Our environmental crises, like global warming, deforestation, fossil fuels... basically just anything that involves us murdering the environment. People just don't fucking care because it's not "personal" enough, I guess. Or a fast-acting downfall. It's slow, insidious, and because of that, people think it's no biggie because it won't affect them in their lifetime and shit like that. Have you ever gotten sick from someone else’s cooking? Yes. My stomach is very, very sensitive to food it hasn't had before, especially if it's a complex recipe with lots of ingredients. What was the last kind of cheese you ate? American, on a turkey sandwich I made the other day. Have you ever abused any substance? Just Pepto Bismol. When I was in middle school, I was absolutely convinced every single day that I was going to throw up (no, I didn't actually feel sick every day; it was anxiety and just concocted in my head), so I would go to the bathroom at some point every day in school to take a pill. The habit only stopped when we ran out one day and Mom didn't get a new bottle immediately. I had to face the school day without it and, obviously, was just fine. What was the last fun thing you did? Caught up on some Tarantula Collective videos, probs. Have you ever dated someone who had a child from a previous relationship? No. Is there any drama currently going on with your family? Nah. What was the last fruit or vegetable you chopped/sliced up? An apple. When you take a nap, do you nap in bed or on the couch? In my bed. Have you ever been called a whore? No. Pretty far from one. What kind of phone do you have? It's a Tracfone. I'm ready to get a new, better one. Do you like hot chocolate? Love itttt. Do you know anyone with an STD? Yes. Are you afraid of deep water? Not as much as most people, it seems. Do you get dizzy easily? I naturally have alarmingly low blood pressure, only made worse by medication, so trust me, I sure as hell do. Have you ever been thrown up on? LKAJSDLKFJAKLWJEKLWJERLK NO Have you ever thrown up on someone? Maybe as a baby? How many times have you thrown up from being so drunk? Zero. Does the sound of fireworks scare you? No, not if I know it's coming. Otherwise I'll probably jump a bit, fearing it being a gunshot. What’s your favorite firework? I don't know how to identify fireworks, ha ha. But generally just the really big, colorful ones. Have you ever been beat up? No. Have you ever seen a jellyfish? Only in aquariums. Do you cry when you get angry? Yes. I cry to cope with a ton of emotions. Would you kiss the last person you kissed again? Plan on it. What do you think people really think about you? That I'm an awkward, reclusive, leeching lowlife without goals I'll actually chase. God, that's painful to think about, what people see from the outside. What’s your favorite part about Thanksgiving? Nothing. I don't like Thanksgiving. I have to spend it every single year with horribly conservative, bigoted fucks. I hate Thanksgiving food, too. How many best friends do you have? One. What kind of car is your favorite? I don't know. Sleek, elegant ones. Do you prefer pens or pencils? Pencils. When did you go to sleep last night? Not 'til like... around 4 in the morning. Do you know anyone who’s had a stillbirth? I'm sure I do. I know MANY people who have had miscarriages. Are there any redheads in your family? I don't believe so, no. Which YouTuber do you feel like you relate to the most? Ummm maybe Morgan Adams, except I'm not funny lmao. What theme do you want for your wedding? Gothic. What theme would you choose for a baby’s nursery? Purely hypothetically, I'd probably choose pastel colors and baby animals for a daughter, and then little cute dinosaurs for a boy. Does your first crush know that he/she was your first crush? No. Do you know your first crush’s middle name? No. Who do you wish you could go on another date with? I'm happy only going on dates with my current boyfriend. Which family member did you get your height from? My mom. We're pretty much the same. Do you feel stupid regularly? ALWAYS. What style of wedding dress do you want? Most likely a ball gown one with a sweetheart top. Definitely subject to change, though; I honestly just love wedding dresses and would want to actually see how I look in varying styles, except mermaid. Mermaid gowns look AWFUL on 99% of people imo. Who was the last friend of yours to have a baby, and what’s the baby’s name? My high school band friend Marcus, his wife had their first baby just the other day. I'm blanking on her name right now. Who is the cutest baby you’ve seen on social media recently? Bindi Irwin's daughter Grace is like illegally cute. What is your opinion on Arby’s? I hate that shit. What is your favorite doughnut? Just an original glazed from Krispy Kreme fuckin does it for me man. But I just love donuts in general. Do you have a hot tub? If so, where is it located? We poor, hunny. What is your favorite party game? I don't really have one, given I don't exactly go to parties. Do you or your parents rake your yard? It doesn't need to be raked. My dad used to occasionally when my parents were still together. Have you won anything recently? No. How often do you make Excel tables? What for? Never. What was the last baby animal you saw in the wild? Umm I want to say I saw a young squirrel dash out of the road semi-recently? Do you like drag queens? If so, got any favourites? Drag queens are, well, fucking queens. I love them. Trixie Mattel is high on the list. How about drag kings? You know... somehow it never struck me that this term existed???? I'm dumb. But anyway, I think it's still awesome. I don't know any (I think?) though. Would it bother you, if your partner had cut contact with their parents? If he had good reason to, it wouldn't bother me. His father is no longer living, but I could not even imagine him cutting contact with his mother since he helps the woman so much and cares a shitload for her. As someone who relates to what I know of her and what she's gone through, I'd definitely be concerned if he cut ties with her. It'd almost feel like an insult to me, too, if that makes sense? Like I'd be scared I was next. Have you ever wondered whether you were adopted? As a kid, yes. I sometimes thought my mom didn't love me as much as my sisters, so I had an episode where I wondered. Have you ever grown a berry bush? No.

Hi, mom, I have a question about allergies. I am allergic to certain types of laundry soap, the worst of which is tide. I suspect that I am allergic to the borax that's in these soaps, as it's a common ingredient in all of the ones I'm allergic to, but do you know of any way to figure out for sure what causes the reaction. As a side note, there isn't an allergist at the practice I go to anymore, but I do have a pulmonologist, if that matters at all. Thank you so much in advance!

Oh dear, I’m so sorry to hear you’re having issues with laundry detergent @colehence, but rest assured you are not alone in being allergic to things like Tide, it’s actually super common.You didn’t mention what your reactions were (and pulmonology is really only going to help if it’s triggering asthma) and while it’s possible you are reacting to the borax, it’s also entirely possible it’s the synthetic scents, the presence of sulfates (huge problem for a lot of us with chronic allergies or things like eczema) or any number of things in brands like Tide. The smell alone of regular Tide triggers respiratory distress in myself, the second worst thing after that being Downy fabric softener which we found out was triggering an allergic reaction which manifested as panic attacks and migraines for me from even just walking down the laundry aisle in the grocery store, so now I don’t. I will do a loop of the entire store to avoid the laundry aisle unless I have my vogmask with me. Cause fuck all that shit.

Even Tide’s “Free and Clear” range scores an F for failure and high levels of allergy and toxicity through EWG.org due to containing Ethanolamine, Benzisothiazolinone (also found in pesticides, fun!) as well as Sodium Borate (Borax) which are all known skin irritants and just generally non allergy friendly. So fuck Tide for pretending to actually make something “free and clear” when what they mean is “we didn’t add the neon blue or that weird chemical scent, enjoy your other major allergens though!”.

The only way to really test this on your own without an allergist, is to try alternative laundry detergent brands. Unfortunately actual free and clear detergents are more expensive, but well worth the investment if you can find a way to get them in bulk. Cause y’know not itching to death/having constant headaches and coughs as well as clean clothes should be an attainable goal for everyone, not just people without allergies.

I have three brands I know I can use without major issue. And because this is going to get long, I will put the full ingredient list of each one under a cut

Planet 2x Ultra Laundry Detergent Free & Clear*

Whole Foods Organic Liquid Laundry Detergent, Unscented**

Seventh Generation Powder Detergents: aka I will die on the hill of this brand, I just wish it was more affordable.****

Another thing worth checking for along with trying to avoid borax is methylisothiazolinone which is in virtually every commercial main brand of everything cause it’s a highly effectiveantimicrobial and preservative. 

And it’s also highly effective at making me dead cause I can’t have anything that contains it in the house, no hand soaps, no laundry, no perfumes, no candles no nothing. Even all of ETD’s things, his soaps, shampoo, lotions, sunscreen, all of it had to go because just even him using it was making my skin break out. Which is unacceptable when you smooch as much as we do. Methylisothiazolinone is also often used hand in hand with benzisothiazolinone, which you may remember from our good worst friend Tide. So that’s another thing to watch out for, even if one isn’t listed, they often go hand in hand together.

Other brands which are low allergen and don’t contain borax but I haven’t personally tried are: 

 Biokleen Free & Clear, 

Ecover (which my mother has been using for literal decades, it’s great if you can get it but I struggle to find it over here at a reasonable price so I didn’t list it up there) 

Attitude: Little Ones Laundry Detergent (Fragrance Free),

Fit Organic Laundry Detergent (Free and Clear), 

and Green Shield Organic, which even their scented ones test low on allergens, so I may need to check those out.

Brands to AVOID if you have skin issues or respiratory allergies include:  

Tide in all shapes and forms, (I’m sorry, I know it’s cheap but compare that to the cost of your allergy meds/asthma meds and oh boy is it suddenly not worth it.) 

Wallgreens “Nice!” brand. 

Ajax. (it burns)

Kirkland Signature (you can hear the Costco lovers screaming) 

Arm and Hammer (yes really, even their free and clear contains sodium alylyr aryl ether sulfate which is a medium range allergy risk for skin and respiratory issues) 

J.R. Watkins ‘Natural’ Liquid Laundry Detergent, Fragrance Free (they don’t actually list what their surfactants are but based on my reaction I think it’s wheat based) 

and lastly, the insidious Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day product range which can honeslty just jump off a cliff with their synthetic fragrances and their methylisothiazolinone and all their other crap they hide behind their “we use essential oils so we’re SAFE” marketing horseshit. I’d literally rather gargle glass than touch any of their products again. It’d have roughly the same effect on my throat and lungs.

Anyway…I hope some of this is helpful for you in trying to work out if it is your laundry cleaning that is causing you the issue. If you want to hit me up on IM (I will be opening it up again this weekend) to chat allergies and what have you, I am totally down with that :) Take care!

*Planet 2x Ultra Laundry Detergent Free & Clear (liquid): Sodium Carbonate, Stearic Acid, Water, Sodium Gluconate, Lauryl Glucoside, PPG-5-Laureth-5 (possible skin irritant) and Laureth-7 (possible skin irritant).

I want to like this brand cause it’s easy for me to get hold of and it’s fairly cheap as “eco friendly” detergents go, but it just kind of doesn’t clean all that well. The powder one cleaned great! Unfortunately it has borax in it and a thing called C-10-16 Pareth-1 which as well as being a high risk ingredient for allergy and asthma sufferers, is also apparently raising some cancer concerns, so out the window that went. Except not really cause it’s not good for the environment and I didn’t want to give the squirrels cancer or something. idk, I worry about those things.

The liquid however is low allergy, it just didn’t seem to work very well in my hard water for when it came to cleaning. Other people might have better luck with it.

**Whole Foods Organic Liquid Laundry Detergent, Unscented: Soapbark, Glycerin, Sodium Carbonate, Sodium Bicarbonate, Sea Salt, Saponofied Cocos (coconut) Oil, Water, Xanthum Gum (yay gluten free. I wish I was kidding†.) Guar Gum, Thymus Satureioides, Aloe Vera Juice Powder, Sapindus Mukurossi and Acacia Senegal Gum.This is the brand I am currently using cause I wanted to try out cause I can apparently get 200 washes for $16 a bottle, which makes it way ahead of all the others in terms of price matching, and also to see if it worked better than other organic brands I’ve tried, which generally fell short of the mark when it came to actually lifting the dirt out of clothes. And it does actually really work well, I’m enjoying using it, if you can say such a thing about laundry detergent. Ewg.org does flag up some of their ingredients as high risk for asthma and respiratory reactions (acacia senegal gum is apparently not good for the lungs) but I’ve had zero skin or respiratory reactions to it, so I’ll keep using it until the bottle runs out and I can try something else.Ewg.org actually rates their non organic 365 Everyday Value 2X Concentrated Powder Laundry Detergent, Unscented*** as better for the environment, as well as being fairly safe for skin allergies, so that’s what I might try after my giant bottle of 200 washes runs out.

***Whole Foods 365 Everyday Value 2X Concentrated Powder Laundry Detergent, Unscented:  Vegetable Soap, Sodium Chloride, Sodium Carbonate, Sodium Metasilicate (possible skin irritant) and Alcohol Ethoxylates (c12) (possible skin irritant)

****Seventh Generation Natural Laundry Detergent Powder:Sodium Carbonate, Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Citrate, Sodium Silicate (water softeners and alkalinity builders), Zeolite (water softeners and alkalinity builders), Fatty Alcohol/Ethoxylated Fatty Ester Blend (coconut and corn-derived cleaning agents), Polyglucose (coconut and corn-derived cleaning agents), Magnesium Sulfate, Sodium Sulfate (performance enhancers), Sodium Percarbonate (non-chlorine bleach), Carboxymethyl Inulin (antiredeposition agents), Carboxymethylcellulose (antiredeposition agents), Protease (non-animal derived enzymes), Cellulase (non-animal derived enzymes), Oleic Acid (plant-derived anti-foaming agents) 

Seventh Generation is one of those rare few brands, where I am not allergic to their scents. I once switched to Trader Joe’s Organic Scented (powder) laundry, only to discover really quickly that they can’t actually verify whether their essential oils being used are cold or steam pressed. But I can tell you from my reaction to it, they’re not. They’re cheap synthetic alcohol based ones and if your allergies focus on synthetic scents, avoid TJ stuff like the plague until they get their ass in gear and actually source their scents better. Seventh generation POWDER detergents however, are the bomb, they work really well in my hard water due to added water softeners, and I can tolerate their scented versions through they are increasingly harder to find. 

Their liquid ones however, do contain methylisothiazolinone which is a high concern for allergies, respiratory issues and is really not good for the fishes if not polluting out earth is something you are concerned about.

†A lot of “healthy” brands are using wheat protein in things as a surfactant now, and for some of us that really can be an issue if we have allergies to wheat in any way or form. I found this out the hard way when I used a shampoo that contained it and broke out in body wide hives and had to drench myself in aloe vera and take all my meds to stop the itching, and even then I looked burned for several days until it calmed down. It also caused a huge chunk of my hair to fall out so if you’re celiac, gluten intolerant or have a wheat allergy in any way shape or form, avoid Avalon Organics Thickening Shampoo, it will, ironically, potentially make your hair fall out.

004. Fuck Your Personal Brand

“Machines wear out. Cars rust. People die. But what lives on are the brands.”

- Hector Liang, as quoted in Naomi Klein's book No Logo

It's strange to think not so much how language has changed over the years, but how we have sanitized it to make what should be horrifying ideas and actions palatable.

“Extraordinary rendition,” aka literally kidnapping people, trapping them in a Kafkaesque legal framework, and imprisoning them in a way that no sane person would consider justice. “Enhanced interrogation,” or torture as it was known once upon a time. “Terrorist,” a person who can only be from a Muslim or Muslim-adjacent country. There are plenty other examples (Citations Needed did a particularly good two-parter (I, II) on this very topic). But these stand out for me in recent popular memory. Indeed, the most consumer-based country on the planet is, no surpise, great at branding – especially rebranding our own heinous acts.

Here I'd like to point out: all the previously examples are aimed at “The Other” – our real-life version of the bugs from Starship Troopers, enemies that we can constantly point to as the source of our collective troubles. Sometimes, this is also used in regards to our internal “Others”; think the term “urban,” most specifically in the late 1990s to early/mid 2000s. “Urban” was simply a code word for Black and Brown people of a certain socioeconomic status and background. We hear these terms – we have heard them – and we accept(ed) them. They become/became part of the zeitgeist. The complicity with which we accept(ed) this lingual rebranding is – or should be – very frightening.

But I want to talk about something that I find insidious, not because it's worse than any of the previous examples (it isn't), but because it's a dehumanization that is not only in vogue, it's even encouraged, and we willingly take it on ourselves. It is the idea, and use of, the term “personal brand.”

I want to break down what a brand really means. Let's use an actual brand – Gatorade. Disclaimer here: Gatorade is in no way affiliated with this site and/or post. And full disclosure, I consume their product, wasteful plastic and all, on a semi-regular basis. (I can't say the following enough: to live in America is to be complicit in so many things, and I'm as guilty as many of my fellow citizens).

What do we take from a drink with the Gatorade brand? It is positioned as a product made for those competing in sports to rehydrate. We see the “G” logo, or the lighting bolt icon, and we can immediately know and recognize what this product is for. A specific purpose has been defined. And when it's fulfilled its purpose? Into the trash recycling bin it goes. We can wax poetic about the “lifestyle” Gatorade represents – and as the aforementioned (and seminal) No Logo pointed out, corporations have long since moved advertising away from the actual product towards a nebulous lifestyle you can “buy into” – but ultimately, we are buying colored sugar water in a bottle. Once the contents of that bottle have been used up, that's that.

You may say I'm being hyperbolic. You may say that this is an unfair comparison; that “personal brand” takes on a different meaning when applied to a human being versus a product. But I would argue that because of the original, root usage of the term, we willingly dehumanize ourselves when we use “personal brand.” We use it as a signal to the rest of the world (a quick signal, because our attention spans are shot to shit) – I fulfill this single purpose (or multiple purposes, if you want to really flex). Maybe we can consider – if we all willingly accept sanitized language for murder, torture, illegal surveillance, etc – how can something like a “personal brand” ever seem scary or wrong? Can we accept it as dehumanizing if we've already dehumanized so many other things?

If we all have thoughts, opinion, feelings, why do we so willingly adopt the rhetoric of a discardable, inanimate object? Or of corporations that want and need us to keep buying and consuming more shit?

Maybe this is the natural tendency of a society that legally accepts corporations as people. A society that will argue as vociferously for a product's qualities as it will for human rights.

And the other aspect of the personal brand is that despite how we as human beings use the term, it fundamentally means that we actually aren't all that unique. And uniqueness has been the selling point of modern times, has it not? Customize your wardrobe, your music, your online ads, because you are the Sun in the Universe of Consumption. But as a “personal brand,” you are a classifiable object. An object based on a frame, a shape, a use, a purpose, that we are all familiar with. The packaging might be slightly different. But whether you are Gatorade, Powerade, or something else, when we collectively decide you are used up, we'll toss you. Hope you had that personal rebrand ready!

I usually hate when people engage in the following kind of quasi-nostalgia, but fuck, man, didn't a “personal brand” used to mean “having a personality” at some point? Are we so isolated and used to having marketing pounded into every one of our senses that this is the only way we know how to communicate with each other? Is this our half-assed grab at immortality?

Forgo doing a great act, or many small acts that go unseen but make an impact. Instead, make great posts. Cultivate an easily accessible personality. Become a great product.

We wind our way through the world, all heroes of our own stories. In this period of late capitalism, where the Almighty Brand has been venerated for decades, perhaps we have reached a natural conclusion of human behavior. We want to stand out, to be noticed, to be loved, to be recognized. I can't fault anyone for that. But for fuck's sake, let's not willingly adopt language that makes us seem less than human. One of the biggest, most influential companies in the world already considers us “products.” This has been mentioned in a legal framework. How many other God-King Corporations (and the pieces of shit running them) take the same viewpoint?

If we voluntarily talk about ourselves this way, why should they be scared of our collective power? When's the last time an empty bottle was worth considering?

The age of banter

The long read: It used to be just a word now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus?

Its the most fucking ridiculous story, isnt it? We went to watch fucking dolphins, and we ended up in fucking Syria. Last summer in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was working as a club rep. I mean, it was fucking 8am, he told an Australian website soon afterwards, and the last fucking club had closed, and we thought, We can still go dolphin watching. Well blag our way on to a fucking boat and go dolphin watching.

But when the boat sailed so far that Cyprus disappeared from view, Ellis explained, they started to worry. Why are we so far from land? they asked the crew. Were fucking miles away and weve got no fucking wifi. Something, Ellis said, had been lost in translation; his exuberant season as a shepherd for the resorts party pilgrims had gone terribly awry. The crew wasnt taking them to watch dolphins: they were going to a Russian naval base in the city of Tartus, on Syrias Mediterranean coast. Yeah, it is a little ridiculous.

It was, nonetheless, a story that had legs. Hungover lads boat trip boob lands them in Syria, wahey-ed the Mirror; British holidaymakers board party boat in Ayia Napa and end up in war-torn SYRIA, guffawed the Express. If you saw these headlines at the time, you may dimly remember the rest. A stubborn trawler captain, chugging doggedly onwards to Tartus, where he turfed the friends out upon landing; interrogation at the hands of Russian intelligence officers; mutual hilarity as the Russians realised what had happened; and, after a hot meal, a quick tour of the area, and a good nights sleep, spots on the next fishing vessel headed back to Cyprus. It was never made clear why the captain had let them on the boat in the first place, but whatever. Everyone lapped it up.

Reflecting on the whole thing five months later, Ellis, a 26-year-old with a business degree and a marketing masters, couldnt totally wrap his head around it. I think I found 35 stories about us, he told me. I read about myself in the Hawaiian Express, do you know what I mean? (Notwithstanding that there doesnt appear to be any such newspaper, yes, I definitely do.)

What made it really weird to see the media pile in with such unstinting enthusiasm was that the story was total cobblers. I could not believe how gullible they were, Ellis said, a top note of glee still in his voice. We were just having a laugh! It was banter!

Lads: this is the age of banter. Its long been somewhat about the banter, but over the last few years, it has come to seem that its all about the banter an unabashedly bumptious attitude that took up a position on the outskirts of the culture in the early 90s and has been larging its way towards the centre ever since. There are hundreds of banter groups on Facebook, from Banter Britain (no memes insinuating child abuse/dead babies!!!) to Wanker Banter 18+ (Have a laugh and keep it sick) to the Premier League Banter Page (The only rule: keep it banter). You can buy an I banter mug on Amazon for 9, or an Archbishop of Banterbury T-shirt for 9.99.

There are now four branches of a restaurant called Scoff & Banter. When things were going badly at Chelsea FC under Jos Mourinho, it was reported the team had banned all banter in an attempt to focus their minds, and that terminology appeared in the newspapers, as if you would know exactly what it meant. Someone has created a banter map of London using a keyword search on the flatshare website SpareRoom, showing exactly where people are looking for a roommate with good banter (Clapham tends to feature prominently). When a 26-year-old man from Leeds posed for a selfie with a bemused aeroplane hijacker, Vice declared it the high-water mark of banter.

Lewis Ellis (left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

If you are younger than about 35, you are likely to hear the term all the time. Either you have banter (if you are funny and can take a joke) or you dont (if you arent and cannot). The mainstream, in summary, is now drunk and asleep on the sofa, and banter is delightedly drawing a penis on its forehead.

As banter has risen, it has expanded. Long a word used to describe submerged expressions of fraternal love, it is now also a word used to excuse uninhibited displays of masculine bravado. Today, it is segregated by class, seized on by brands, picked over by psychologists, and deplored by cultural critics; it is dominant, hotly contested and only hazily understood.

And so, whether he intends it to or not, Ellis use of the term raises some questions. Is he throwing his lot in with the most pervasive branch of the blokeish mainstream, a sanitised and benevolent hilarity that stretches from lad-dad panel shows to your mates zinger about your terrible haircut? Or is he lining up with the misogynist imitators of the Bullingdon club, a sprinkling of racists, and, as we shall see, an actual murderer purveyors of a malicious and insidious masculinity that insists on its indivisible authority and calls you a slut if you object?

Ellis isnt preoccupied by these questions, but for what its worth, he does say that he and his friends never had the slightest intention of going to Syria. We werent really trying to fool anyone, he told me, although Im not sure thats entirely consistent with the facts. We were out for a stroll, and we came across this area that looked really run down, we thought it looked like Syria. So we put it on the club reps [Facebook] page that thats where we were. And everyone started liking it. And then one of the people who contacted us was from LADBible which is like the Bible, but for LADS so we said, well have a mess around here. Well tell a completely ridiculous story, see if the media believes it. See if we can become LADBible famous.

It did, they could. Eventually, the truth came out, not thanks to any especially determined investigative journalism, but because Ellis cheerily admitted on Facebook that his tale of magnificent idiocy was a fiction. Hahaha what a prank, he wrote, with some justification.

The confession only brought another cycle of attention. Publications that had picked up the story in the first place resurfaced it with new headlines to reflect the audacity of the invention; social media users adduced it as evidence for their views of young men, or the media, or both. The Russian embassys Twitter account called it a telling example of how many Syria (and Russia) stories are made up by UK papers, which was great geopolitical banter. The attention entertained Ellis, but he says it wasnt the point. We just thought it was funny, he said. People are too serious. I keep being told to grow up, but I still want to have a good time. Ive had the jobs, Ive got the education. But when Im off work, I want to escape.

Ellis is an enthusiast and an optimist. He is, he told me late last year, desperate to take every opportunity, just to say yes to everything I can. We were on a night out in Manchester with his friends Tyson, John and Chris. In the course of the evening, the following things found their way into my beer: fingers; salt; vinegar; mayonnaise; a chip; saliva; a 10 note; and, I hazily remember being told after the fact, at least two shots of vodka.

Everyones got a thing in the group, Ellis said, as we walked from one bar to the next. One guy, hes not even that ugly, we say he looks like a Peperami. Tysons got this mole on his face, its like a Coco Pop, so youve got a Coco Pop on your face. I looked like Harry Potter when I was a kid, so they call me Potter, thats my nickname. Every single one of us has something. So you youve got Chinese eyes. Youre Chinese.

For the record, I didnt think this was OK, but coming after such a harmless litany, it didnt seem malicious enough to confront. Of course, tacit endorsement is what makes such offensive epithets a commonplace, and so it troubles me that it made me feel mysteriously welcome, just as it had when John punched me lightly in the balls when I arrived. There was no doubting Elliss sincerity: as he spoke, the sheer daft beauty of male friendship seemed to amaze him, almost to the point of physical pain. We just take the piss out of each other, and thats how we show our love, he said. So many group chats on the phone, and you just take the piss until they cry. And its like, when youre really killing them, you go, Ill stop if you want, because you know they cant say yes, so you just keep going. Then we arrived at the next bar, where I was made to drink something called a Zombie.

Early in the evening, before any of this had undermined my ability to take useful notes, Ellis broke off from talking as we walked down the street and sidled into a window display at Next Home, where he Tracey Emined a carefully made bed by climbing into it and rolling around. Everyone cracked up. Give the world a laugh, Ellis tends to think, and the world will smile back at you. Jump on a boat, and youll end up somewhere great; make the boat up, and youll get there faster. Its all about having fun, its all about the banter, he said, after hed rejoined us outside. Banter is about making the world a more exciting place.

If nobody can agree on what banter is, thats hardly a new problem. The first usage of the word recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from noted Restoration lad Thomas dUrfey, also known for his hit song The Fart, in a satirical 1677 play called Madam Fickle. Banter him, banter him, Toby, a character called Zechiel urges, which may be the first time that someone called Toby was so instructed, but certainly wasnt the last.

The OED also notes early attempts at a definition by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. (Swift mentions a banter upon transubstantiation, in which a cork is turned into a horse, and fair enough, turning a cork into a horse would be classic banter.) Both are a little disgusted by the word, and neither unearths much of an origin story: by their accounts, banter is so coarse that it emerged, fully formed and without antecedent, out of the mouths of oafs.

As it turns out, though, the OED is not at present fully able to handle the banter. According to Eleanor Maier, an associate editor on the dictionary, a search of earlier English texts reveals that a number of previous examples are missing from the dictionarys definition, which was first drafted in 1885 including a quote from a 1657 translation of Don Quixote. (After examining the history, Maier told me that she would be adding banter to the list of entries that are up for review.)

dougie stew (@DougieStew)

Welcome to London #BagelGate pic.twitter.com/KcJoz0ycZU

February 26, 2017

In recent years, banter has barged into our lives at a remarkable clip. Googles Ngram Viewer, a tool that assesses (with some limitations) the frequency with which a term appears in a large database of written sources, finds that banter popped up about twice as often in 2008, the most recent year covered, as it did in 1980.

But banter plugged away for a long time before it became an overnight success. In the 19th century, it often denoted a kind of formal sparring. Even as the term evolved over the 20th, it continued to seem a little prim. In the House of Commons in 1936, Ramsay MacDonald, the former Labour prime minister who had returned in a new seat after losing his old one, was subjected to a good deal of banter Dear old Granny MacDonald!, among other witticisms.In 1981, a Guardian report that chess champion Anatoly Karpov and his handlers had successfully protested at his challenger Viktor Korchnois constant cross-board talk ran under the unlikely headline: Chess banter banned.

Such stories do little to prepare us for what banter has become. Consider the viral video that became known as #bagelgate earlier this year. In the recording, a minor scuffle broke out on the 00.54 train from Kings Cross to Huntingdon, and then for no obviously related reason a woman who had a large bag of bagels decided to put one on the head of the guy sitting in front of her, and then another after he took it off and threw it out of the window, and another and another, and then everyone in the carriage started chanting hes got a bagel on his head, and eventually the slightly spoddy victim who is me when I was 13 and someone filled my pencil case with Mr Kipling apple pies (squashed, oozing) because I was fat lost it and screamed Get the fuck out of my face!, and then another fight broke out on the platform, and then the police got on to the train, and every single person fell into not-me-guv silence: this is not Granny MacDonalds banter any more.

If it is hard to understand how these activities can fall under the same umbrella, it should be noted that a phenomenon may predate our choice of term to describe it its just that the act of definition makes it more visible, and perhaps more likely to be imitated. At some point, though, banter became the name for what British men already regarded as their natural tone of voice. There is a very deeply embedded folk culture in the UK of public ribaldry, extreme sarcasm, facetiousness in other words, of laddishness, says Tony Thorne, a linguist and cultural historian. What you might think of as banter now is rooted in that tradition.

That tradition first lashed itself to banters mast in the early 1990s, and controversy soon followed. In June 1992, a Guardian story headlined Police fire sex banter officer, about the dismissal of a sergeant for sexual harassment, recorded an early skirmish in the modern banter wars, and an important new layer to its meaning in the wild: The move is seen as part of the Metropolitan polices desire to reassure women officers that what has previously been tolerated as banter is no longer acceptable. Two years later, the lads mags arrived.

The first edition of Loaded magazine appeared in May 1994, with a picture of Gary Oldman on the front smoking a dog-end, under a banner that declared him a super lad. What fresh lunacy is this? the editors note read. Loaded is a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters Loaded is for the man who believes he can do anything, if only he wasnt hungover.

If banter dismays you, James Brown, the magazines first editor, is quite an easy bogeyman. As he acknowledges himself, he created a title that defined a genre. Loaded was swiftly recognised as a foundational text for a resurgent and ebullient masculinity that had been searching for public expression. While it was always overtly horny, the magazine was initially more interested in a forlorn, slackjawed and self-ironising appreciation of A-listers (one reversible poster had Cindy Crawford on one side and a steam train on the other) than the grot-plus-football formula that successors and imitators like Maxim, Zoo and Nuts milked to destruction. But it also flirted with something murkier.

To its critics, Loaded and its imitators aimed to sanitise a certain hooliganistic worldview with a strategic disclaimer. Banter emerges as this relentless gloss of irony over everything, said Bethan Benwell, senior lecturer in language and linguistics at the University of Stirling and the author of several papers on mens magazines. The constant excusing of sexist or homophobic sentiments with this wink that says you dont really mean it. Benwell pointed to Loadeds emblematic strapline: For men who should know better.

Brown denies that his magazine invented banter. Instead, he says, it captured a zeitgeist that the media had previously failed to acknowledge; the folk culture that Tony Thorne refers to, brought out into the open. Before Browns intervention, GQ had run John Major and Michael Heseltine as cover stars, for Gods sake. I took the interests and the outlook of the young men that I knew, and I put them in a magazine, Brown said. Im not responsible for the tone of the later entrants to the market. We were criticised because we fancied women, not because we belittled them.

The thing about Loaded was that the way we wrote reflected the way we were with our mates, he went on. Theres definitely a thing that exists in the male outlook: you take the piss out of the people you like, and you ignore the people you dont.

Accept this as your starting point, and objections become exhausting to sustain: what youre objecting to is an act of affection. Of course, this is what makes it insidious. Because Browns account rests on the intention behind the magazine, and Benwells on the effect it had, they are impossible to reconcile. Its a very difficult thing to resist or challenge without looking like the stereotypical humourless feminist, said Benwell. But by laughing, you become complicit.

Loaded gave this new kind of banter escape velocity, and it began to colonise other worlds. On BBC2, for example, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were staking out their own territory with Fantasy Football League, a mixture of sketches and celebrity chat that managed to be enthusiastic and satirical at the same time, and reached its peak when the pair became national icons, thanks to their Euro 96 anthem, Three Lions. While a long-running joke about the Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lees pineapple haircut seems flatly racist in retrospect Baddiel did an impression of him in blackface by and large, the tone was milder and more conventional than the magazines were: this was the sensibility of the university graduate slumming it before embarking on grown-up life.

Baddiel implied that laddism could easily occupy a spectrum from ogling to literature, drawing a line to Nick Hornbys memoir of life as an Arsenal fan, Fever Pitch. Hornby once said to me that all this stuff you know, fantasy football and his book is men talking about things that they like and for a while in the mid-80s they werent allowed to, he said in 1995. Ive always liked football and Ive always liked naked women, and its easier to talk about that now than it was eight years ago. Those comments reflect a kind of sneer at its critics that you could often detect in Fantasy Football League, even as its hosts protested that they were just having a laugh though Baddiel himself denies that view. Twenty years on, he, like Brown, is at pains to draw a line between the approach that he and Skinner popularised, and the forms that came later. I guess me and Frank did specialise in banter, he said in an email. In a time before it was known as bantz.

Over the next 10 years, two things happened that ushered in the age of banter. (You might call it mature banter, except that its also the opposite.) First, instead of just being a thing that happened, it became a thing that people talked about. Then, as it became a more tangible cultural product, everyone started trying to make money out of it. The watershed moment, the forms equivalent to Dylan going electric, was the invention of Dave.

Like most good ideas, it looks simple enough in retrospect. Before Dave was Dave, it was UKTV Gold 2. The predecessor channels audience share was 0.761%, and no one could tell who on earth it was supposed to be for. But we had the content, says Steve North, the channels brand manager in 2007 and content of a particular kind that the existing name did very little to communicate: Have I Got News for You, They Think Its All Over, Top Gear. Viewers said they loved the repartee, the humour. It reminded them of spending time with their funniest friends.

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

The target audience was highly specific. It was men married or in relationships, maybe with young children, not going to the pub as much as they used to, says Andy Bryant, managing director of Red Bee, the agency brought in to work on the rebrand. And they missed that camaraderie.

Their purpose thus fixed, North started to run brainstorming sessions at which people would shout out suggestions for the name. One of the ones we collected was Dave, he says. We thought, great, but we cant call it that. But then we thought, Its a surrogate friend. If the audience really sees it as that, if they see it as genuinely providing the banter, maybe we can really give it a name.

They put their hunch through its paces. The market research company YouGov was commissioned to test Dave alongside a bunch of other names (Matthew and Kevin were also on the shortlist), but nothing else had the same everyman resonance. For us, Dave is a sensibility, a place, an emotion, a feeling, said North, his tone thoughtful, almost gnomic. Everyone has their own sense of who Dave is, thats the important thing. Its hard to find anyone who doesnt know someone called Dave.

Now the channel had a brand, it needed a slogan. Lots of people claim they played a part in the naming, says Bryant. But it was just as important to encapsulate what the channel was all about. And at some point someone, I dont know who, wrote it on a board: The home of witty banter. The rebrand added 8m new viewers in six months; Dave saw a 71% increase in its target audience of affluent young men.

Conceived by the first generation of senior professionals to have grown up with banter as an unremarkable part of their demographics cultural mix, the channel crystallised a change, and accelerated it. In 2006, The Ricky Gervais Show, in which Gervais and Stephen Merchant relentlessly poked fun at their in-house idiot savant Karl Pilkington, became the most popular podcast of all time. In 2007, the year of Daves rebrand, Top Gears ratings shot from below 5m to a record high of 8m. The following year, QI moved from BBC4 to BBC2. (A tie-in book published the same year, QI: Advanced Banter, sold more than 125,000 copies.)

North saw the kind of fraternal teasing that was being monetised by his channel, and the panel shows that were its lifeblood, as fundamentally benign. The key thing is that its two-way, he said. Its about two people riffing off each other.

But like his 20th-century forebears, he can see that something ugly has evolved, and he wants to keep his brand well away from it. Bants, he said with distaste. That thing of cover for dubious behaviour we hate and despise it massively. When we launched, it was about fun, being light-hearted, maybe pushing each other without being disrespectful. When people talk about Ive had a go at that person, great banter no, thats just nasty.

By the turn of the decade,as other branding agencies mimicked the success of Dave, banter was everywhere, a folk tradition that had acquired a peculiar sort of respectability. The men who celebrated it werent just lads in the pub any more: they had spending power and establishment allies on their side. But they were, by the same token, more visible to critics. Aggression from an underdog can be overlooked; aggression from the establishment is serious enough to become a matter of public concern.

Take Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Sky Sports brand-defining football presenters, who got themselves up to their necks in some extremely bad banter in 2011. Keys blamed dark forces, but everyone else blamed him and Gray for being misogynists. We knew this because there was footage.

The firestorm, as Keys called it, centred on claims that the two men had said and done heinously sexist things off-air. Most memorable, at least for its phrase-making, was the clip in which Keys eagerly asked his fellow pundit Jamie Redknapp if hed smashed it it being a woman and asserted that he could often be found hanging out the back of it.

Gray went quickly. In the days before he followed, Keys burned hot with injustice in a series of mea-sorta-culpas, particularly focused on the tape in which he expressed his derision at the idea that a woman, Sian Massey-Ellis, could be an assistant referee in the Premier League.

It was just banter, he said. Or, more exactly, just a bit of banter, as he said Massey-Ellis had assured him she understood in a later telephone conversation in which, he added, much banter passed between us. She and I enjoyed some banter, he protested. It was lads-mag banter, he insisted. It was stone-age banter, he admitted. We liked to have banter, he explained. Richard Keys was sorry if you were offended, but also, it wasnt his fault if you didnt get it. It was just banter, for goodness sake!

Up to their necks in some extremely bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Keys insistence that his mistake was simply a failure to move with the times was nothing new: banter has always seemed to carry a longing for the past, for an imagined era before male friendship was so cramped by the tiresome obligations of feminist scrutiny. But while his underlying views were painfully dated, his conception of banter was entirely modern: a sly expansion of the words meaning, and a self-conscious contention that it provided an impregnable defence.

The Keys variation understood banter, first, as a catch-all means of denying responsibility if anyone was hurt; and, second, as a means of reinforcing a bond between two people by being cruel about a third. The comparison wouldnt please a couple of alphas like Keys and Gray, but both strategies brought it closer to a style of communication with classically feminine associations: gossip. Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch (lol) Professor in Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that the two modes of interaction follow basically the same structure. People gossip as a trust game, she said. You tell someone your unsayable private secret, and it bonds you closer together. Theyre supposed to reciprocate with a confidence of their own. Well, banter works in the same way now. You say something outrageous, and you see if the other person dares to top your remark.

The trust game in banter was traditionally supposed to be: do you trust me when I say were friends in spite of the mean things Im saying about you? But now theres a second version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean things Im saying about other people? I think originally it was a harmless thing, said Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an archive of male group conversation, mostly recorded by her students, that goes back to the 1980s. But then it started to be used as an excuse when men were caught out engaging in forms of it that werent so harmless.

It comes down to context and intent, says the comedian Bridget Christie. The gentler form of banter is still knocking around, she suggested, but now it exists alongside something darker: I found The Inbetweeners adolescent banter hilarious, because it was equal and unthreatening. But there is obviously a world of difference between a group of teenage boys benignly taking the piss out of each other, and a bigot being racist or misogynist and trying to pass it off as a joke.

Trace the rise of banter, and you will find that it corresponds to the rise of political correctness or, anyway, to the backlash against political correctness gone mad. That phrase and just banter mirror each other perfectly: one denoting a priggish culture that is deemed to have overreached, the other a laid-back culture that is deemed to have been unfairly reined in. Ironically enough, just banter does exactly what it accuses political correctness of, seeking to close down discussion by telling you that meaning is settled by category rather than content. Political correctness asserts that a racist joke is primarily racist, whereas banter asserts that a racist joke is primarily a joke. In the past, the men who used it rarely had to define it, or to explain themselves to anybody else. Today, in contrast, it is named all the time. The biggest change isnt the banter itself, says Bethan Benwell. Its the explicit use of the word as a disclaimer.

By sheer repetition and by its use as an unanswerable defence, banter has turned from an abstraction into a vast and calcified description of actions as well as words: gone from a way of talking to a way of life, a style that accidentally became a worldview. He bantered you, people sometimes say: you always used to banter with your mates, but now it often sounds like something you do to them. Once it was directionless, inconclusive chatter with wit as the engine that drove it, said the comedian Russell Kane. Now, if I trip you up, thats banter.

You might think the humiliation suffered by Keys and Gray would have made banter less appealing as a get-out, but not a bit of it. Banter, increasingly, seems like the first refuge of the inexcusable. In 2014, Malky Mackay, who had been fired as manager of Cardiff City Football Club a year earlier, was caught having sent texts that referred to Chinese people eating dogs, black people being criminals, Jewish people being avaricious, and gay people being snakes all of which were initially optimistically defended by the League Managers Association as letting off steam to a friend during some friendly text message banter. The comedian Dapper Laughs, whose real name is Daniel OReilly, established himself as banters rat king, with his very own ITV2 show, and then lost it after he suggested that an audience member at one of his gigs was gagging for a rape. A man was convicted of murder after he crushed his friend against a wall with a Jeep Cherokee after an argument over badger-baiting, a course of action that he said had been intended as banter. Another slashed the throat of someone he had met in a pub and described the incident as a moment of banter after 14 or 15 pints. Both are now in prison.

By any sane measure,banter was falling into disrepute, as often a disguise for malice as a word for the ribaldry of lads on the lash. Still it did not go away: instead, the worst of it has mutated again, asserting its authority in public and saving its creepiest tendencies for the shadows or, at least, for the company of five, or 10, or 20 of your closest mates.

At the London School of Economics, it started with a leaflet. Each year at the universitys freshers fair, LSE Rugby Football Club distributed a banterous primer on rugby culture. In October 2014, says the then-president of the student union, Nona Buckley-Irvine, a student came to her in tears with a copy in her hand. The leaflet talked about trollops, slags, crumpet, mingers, and the desirability of misogyny; there were passing references to the horrors of homosexual humiliation and outright homosexual debauchery. Anyone charmed by all this was invited to sign up for the club and join the banter list, entitling them to participate in the exchange of chappish email conversation.

To anyone with a passing knowledge of university laddism, it was hard to imagine a more ordinary iteration. Still, after the unreconstructed chappishness of the leaflet came to light, the club knew it had a problem. It issued a collective apology acknowledging that we have a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter, and promised to organise a workshop. But there was reason to be sceptical about the depth of that commitment.

When Buckley-Irvine and her colleagues published a report on the incident, they noted a string of others, including an antisemitic assault on a university ski trip to Val dIsere in 2011. And there were other indiscretions it didnt mention. According to two people who were present, one club dinner at an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane ended with a stripper having bottles thrown at her when, already intimidated, she refused to take her clothes off. She hid in the toilet, and had to be escorted out by a member of staff as the team vandalised the restaurant.

Photograph: Alamy

According to five people who were either members of the rugby club or closely associated with it, one notorious senior member was widely thought to be responsible for the leaflet. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) But when they came to defend themselves to the student union, members of the club fell back on one of the most revered pillars of laddism: all for one, one for all. Theyd clearly worked out a line, says Nona Buckley-Irvine. No one individual was responsible. They were sorry. It was just banter. Thats what they all said.

The accountancy firm KPMG, which sponsored the universitys wider Athletics Union, decided that banter was not an especially helpful brand association, and withdrew funding worth 22,000. The students union decided to disband the club for the academic year. The decision moved some observers to disgust. It was a gross overreaction, a former team member told me. We were the best-behaved team when it came to actually playing rugby but they banned that bit and they couldnt ban any of the rest.

Others took a less measured tone. I had old members emailing me and calling me a fascist, says Buckley-Irvine. Asking me if I didnt understand that it was just banter. Rugby players chanted abuse at her on nights out, she told me. They shoulder-barged her, and called her a cunt.

These kinds of interactions would tend to take place on Wednesdays, also known as sports night, at a bar in Leicester Square. Sports night was the apotheosis of the rugby clubs bleak solidarity. In deference to what you might call the wingers-before-mingers code, for instance, members of the club who were expected to dress in suits werent allowed to speak to women before 9pm. So they would just shout abuse instead, one female former student, who Ill call Anna, remembered. One chant, she said, went, Nine nos and a yes is a yes. At the time, Anna thought that it was all a joke. People would say, Its just banter all the time. After everything. Absolutely everything, she said, sitting in a cafe in south London. If you were meeting someone new, saying they had good banter, that was a pretty high compliment. Whereas if you dont go along with that stuff, its seen as, you cant take the chat, you cant take the banter. And its not seen as having a stance against it. Its seen as not being able to keep up.

After the rugby club was disbanded, nothing much changed in sports night social life. Many members of the club still went on the same nights out; they just colonised other teams. They still addressed girls as Sarah 2 or Sarah 8 depending on how attractive they considered them out of 10; they still had shouted conversations about their sex lives in front of the women they had slept with but refused to acknowledge.

That culture was not confined to Wednesday nights. Anna remembers a guy who took her picture as she slept, naked, in the bed they were sharing, and circulated it to another non-university sports team via WhatsApp. She wasnt meant to see it on his phone.

Ask anyone well-informed where banter resides now, and theyll give the same answer: WhatsApp groups and email threads, the safe spaces of the lad class. What youd get out of those WhatsApp threads, its another world of drama, one former member of the football club said. The details of girls bodies that youd read, a few funny jibes, that was the limit for me. But when it moved on to, like, really, really bad stuff, always about sex it was too much. Those threads are the source of everything.

If the threads were an outlet, they were by no means the limit. Banter, by common consent, wasnt confined to mocking each other: it was about action. If you dressed up for a night out, one female student remembered, it was just kind of status quo that you could have your arse grabbed. It was just like, Oh, that was kind of weird, but OK, thatll happen. Like everyone else willing to speak about it, her view of that culture was perplexingly nuanced, sometimes contradictory. It sounds scary, she said, but that being said, some of my best nights were there, and like it was fun. But then she said: What was defined as serious just got so pushed. I think for someone to lodge a complaint they would have to be actually hurt.

Anna remembers lots of sketchy incidents. She recalls nights when her choices faded into a blur, and she wondered if she had really been in control. But at the time, I would never call it out, she said. And then, youre all living in halls together, and the next day, its like: What did you do last night? Thats hilarious. Thats banter.

When Anna thinks about the behaviour of some of the men she knew at university, she finds it hard to pin down exactly what she thinks of them. Theres one in particular who sticks in her mind. On a Wednesday night, he was a banter guy, she said. He was a Wednesday animal. But the rest of the time, he was my friend.

Controversial though all this was at the time, no one seems to think that it will have cost the perpetrators much. Ive tried so hard to leave all that behind, said the former member of the football team. But those guys theyre all going on to run banks, or the country, or whatever. The senior rugby man who many held responsible, by the way, has landed on his feet. Today, he has a job at KPMG.

In 2017, every new instance of banter is immediately spotted and put through the journalistic wringer. (Vices Joel Golby, who wrote the definitive text on the bagel thing, has made a career from his exquisite close readings of the form.) But when each new absolute legend emerges, we dont usually have the context to make the essential judgment: do the proponents tend towards the harmless warmth of Ellis and his mates, or the frank hostility of the LSE rugby boys? Is their love of irony straightforward, or a mask for something else?

As Richard Keys and Dapper Laughs and their cohorts have polluted the idea of banter, the commercial entities that endorsed its rise have become uneasy with the label. They wanted it to go viral; they hadnt expected it to go postal. Dave, for example, has dropped the home of witty banter slogan. Its not about classic male humour any more, its a little bit smarter, says UKTVs Steve North. We definitely say it less than we used to.

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/02/the-age-of-banter/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/163730951422

The age of banter

The long read: It used to be just a word now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus?

Its the most fucking ridiculous story, isnt it? We went to watch fucking dolphins, and we ended up in fucking Syria. Last summer in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was working as a club rep. I mean, it was fucking 8am, he told an Australian website soon afterwards, and the last fucking club had closed, and we thought, We can still go dolphin watching. Well blag our way on to a fucking boat and go dolphin watching.

But when the boat sailed so far that Cyprus disappeared from view, Ellis explained, they started to worry. Why are we so far from land? they asked the crew. Were fucking miles away and weve got no fucking wifi. Something, Ellis said, had been lost in translation; his exuberant season as a shepherd for the resorts party pilgrims had gone terribly awry. The crew wasnt taking them to watch dolphins: they were going to a Russian naval base in the city of Tartus, on Syrias Mediterranean coast. Yeah, it is a little ridiculous.

It was, nonetheless, a story that had legs. Hungover lads boat trip boob lands them in Syria, wahey-ed the Mirror; British holidaymakers board party boat in Ayia Napa and end up in war-torn SYRIA, guffawed the Express. If you saw these headlines at the time, you may dimly remember the rest. A stubborn trawler captain, chugging doggedly onwards to Tartus, where he turfed the friends out upon landing; interrogation at the hands of Russian intelligence officers; mutual hilarity as the Russians realised what had happened; and, after a hot meal, a quick tour of the area, and a good nights sleep, spots on the next fishing vessel headed back to Cyprus. It was never made clear why the captain had let them on the boat in the first place, but whatever. Everyone lapped it up.

Reflecting on the whole thing five months later, Ellis, a 26-year-old with a business degree and a marketing masters, couldnt totally wrap his head around it. I think I found 35 stories about us, he told me. I read about myself in the Hawaiian Express, do you know what I mean? (Notwithstanding that there doesnt appear to be any such newspaper, yes, I definitely do.)

What made it really weird to see the media pile in with such unstinting enthusiasm was that the story was total cobblers. I could not believe how gullible they were, Ellis said, a top note of glee still in his voice. We were just having a laugh! It was banter!

Lads: this is the age of banter. Its long been somewhat about the banter, but over the last few years, it has come to seem that its all about the banter an unabashedly bumptious attitude that took up a position on the outskirts of the culture in the early 90s and has been larging its way towards the centre ever since. There are hundreds of banter groups on Facebook, from Banter Britain (no memes insinuating child abuse/dead babies!!!) to Wanker Banter 18+ (Have a laugh and keep it sick) to the Premier League Banter Page (The only rule: keep it banter). You can buy an I banter mug on Amazon for 9, or an Archbishop of Banterbury T-shirt for 9.99.

There are now four branches of a restaurant called Scoff & Banter. When things were going badly at Chelsea FC under Jos Mourinho, it was reported the team had banned all banter in an attempt to focus their minds, and that terminology appeared in the newspapers, as if you would know exactly what it meant. Someone has created a banter map of London using a keyword search on the flatshare website SpareRoom, showing exactly where people are looking for a roommate with good banter (Clapham tends to feature prominently). When a 26-year-old man from Leeds posed for a selfie with a bemused aeroplane hijacker, Vice declared it the high-water mark of banter.

Lewis Ellis (left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

If you are younger than about 35, you are likely to hear the term all the time. Either you have banter (if you are funny and can take a joke) or you dont (if you arent and cannot). The mainstream, in summary, is now drunk and asleep on the sofa, and banter is delightedly drawing a penis on its forehead.

As banter has risen, it has expanded. Long a word used to describe submerged expressions of fraternal love, it is now also a word used to excuse uninhibited displays of masculine bravado. Today, it is segregated by class, seized on by brands, picked over by psychologists, and deplored by cultural critics; it is dominant, hotly contested and only hazily understood.

And so, whether he intends it to or not, Ellis use of the term raises some questions. Is he throwing his lot in with the most pervasive branch of the blokeish mainstream, a sanitised and benevolent hilarity that stretches from lad-dad panel shows to your mates zinger about your terrible haircut? Or is he lining up with the misogynist imitators of the Bullingdon club, a sprinkling of racists, and, as we shall see, an actual murderer purveyors of a malicious and insidious masculinity that insists on its indivisible authority and calls you a slut if you object?

Ellis isnt preoccupied by these questions, but for what its worth, he does say that he and his friends never had the slightest intention of going to Syria. We werent really trying to fool anyone, he told me, although Im not sure thats entirely consistent with the facts. We were out for a stroll, and we came across this area that looked really run down, we thought it looked like Syria. So we put it on the club reps [Facebook] page that thats where we were. And everyone started liking it. And then one of the people who contacted us was from LADBible which is like the Bible, but for LADS so we said, well have a mess around here. Well tell a completely ridiculous story, see if the media believes it. See if we can become LADBible famous.

It did, they could. Eventually, the truth came out, not thanks to any especially determined investigative journalism, but because Ellis cheerily admitted on Facebook that his tale of magnificent idiocy was a fiction. Hahaha what a prank, he wrote, with some justification.

The confession only brought another cycle of attention. Publications that had picked up the story in the first place resurfaced it with new headlines to reflect the audacity of the invention; social media users adduced it as evidence for their views of young men, or the media, or both. The Russian embassys Twitter account called it a telling example of how many Syria (and Russia) stories are made up by UK papers, which was great geopolitical banter. The attention entertained Ellis, but he says it wasnt the point. We just thought it was funny, he said. People are too serious. I keep being told to grow up, but I still want to have a good time. Ive had the jobs, Ive got the education. But when Im off work, I want to escape.

Ellis is an enthusiast and an optimist. He is, he told me late last year, desperate to take every opportunity, just to say yes to everything I can. We were on a night out in Manchester with his friends Tyson, John and Chris. In the course of the evening, the following things found their way into my beer: fingers; salt; vinegar; mayonnaise; a chip; saliva; a 10 note; and, I hazily remember being told after the fact, at least two shots of vodka.

Everyones got a thing in the group, Ellis said, as we walked from one bar to the next. One guy, hes not even that ugly, we say he looks like a Peperami. Tysons got this mole on his face, its like a Coco Pop, so youve got a Coco Pop on your face. I looked like Harry Potter when I was a kid, so they call me Potter, thats my nickname. Every single one of us has something. So you youve got Chinese eyes. Youre Chinese.

For the record, I didnt think this was OK, but coming after such a harmless litany, it didnt seem malicious enough to confront. Of course, tacit endorsement is what makes such offensive epithets a commonplace, and so it troubles me that it made me feel mysteriously welcome, just as it had when John punched me lightly in the balls when I arrived. There was no doubting Elliss sincerity: as he spoke, the sheer daft beauty of male friendship seemed to amaze him, almost to the point of physical pain. We just take the piss out of each other, and thats how we show our love, he said. So many group chats on the phone, and you just take the piss until they cry. And its like, when youre really killing them, you go, Ill stop if you want, because you know they cant say yes, so you just keep going. Then we arrived at the next bar, where I was made to drink something called a Zombie.

Early in the evening, before any of this had undermined my ability to take useful notes, Ellis broke off from talking as we walked down the street and sidled into a window display at Next Home, where he Tracey Emined a carefully made bed by climbing into it and rolling around. Everyone cracked up. Give the world a laugh, Ellis tends to think, and the world will smile back at you. Jump on a boat, and youll end up somewhere great; make the boat up, and youll get there faster. Its all about having fun, its all about the banter, he said, after hed rejoined us outside. Banter is about making the world a more exciting place.

If nobody can agree on what banter is, thats hardly a new problem. The first usage of the word recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from noted Restoration lad Thomas dUrfey, also known for his hit song The Fart, in a satirical 1677 play called Madam Fickle. Banter him, banter him, Toby, a character called Zechiel urges, which may be the first time that someone called Toby was so instructed, but certainly wasnt the last.

The OED also notes early attempts at a definition by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. (Swift mentions a banter upon transubstantiation, in which a cork is turned into a horse, and fair enough, turning a cork into a horse would be classic banter.) Both are a little disgusted by the word, and neither unearths much of an origin story: by their accounts, banter is so coarse that it emerged, fully formed and without antecedent, out of the mouths of oafs.

As it turns out, though, the OED is not at present fully able to handle the banter. According to Eleanor Maier, an associate editor on the dictionary, a search of earlier English texts reveals that a number of previous examples are missing from the dictionarys definition, which was first drafted in 1885 including a quote from a 1657 translation of Don Quixote. (After examining the history, Maier told me that she would be adding banter to the list of entries that are up for review.)

dougie stew (@DougieStew)

Welcome to London #BagelGate pic.twitter.com/KcJoz0ycZU

February 26, 2017

In recent years, banter has barged into our lives at a remarkable clip. Googles Ngram Viewer, a tool that assesses (with some limitations) the frequency with which a term appears in a large database of written sources, finds that banter popped up about twice as often in 2008, the most recent year covered, as it did in 1980.

But banter plugged away for a long time before it became an overnight success. In the 19th century, it often denoted a kind of formal sparring. Even as the term evolved over the 20th, it continued to seem a little prim. In the House of Commons in 1936, Ramsay MacDonald, the former Labour prime minister who had returned in a new seat after losing his old one, was subjected to a good deal of banter Dear old Granny MacDonald!, among other witticisms.In 1981, a Guardian report that chess champion Anatoly Karpov and his handlers had successfully protested at his challenger Viktor Korchnois constant cross-board talk ran under the unlikely headline: Chess banter banned.

Such stories do little to prepare us for what banter has become. Consider the viral video that became known as #bagelgate earlier this year. In the recording, a minor scuffle broke out on the 00.54 train from Kings Cross to Huntingdon, and then for no obviously related reason a woman who had a large bag of bagels decided to put one on the head of the guy sitting in front of her, and then another after he took it off and threw it out of the window, and another and another, and then everyone in the carriage started chanting hes got a bagel on his head, and eventually the slightly spoddy victim who is me when I was 13 and someone filled my pencil case with Mr Kipling apple pies (squashed, oozing) because I was fat lost it and screamed Get the fuck out of my face!, and then another fight broke out on the platform, and then the police got on to the train, and every single person fell into not-me-guv silence: this is not Granny MacDonalds banter any more.

If it is hard to understand how these activities can fall under the same umbrella, it should be noted that a phenomenon may predate our choice of term to describe it its just that the act of definition makes it more visible, and perhaps more likely to be imitated. At some point, though, banter became the name for what British men already regarded as their natural tone of voice. There is a very deeply embedded folk culture in the UK of public ribaldry, extreme sarcasm, facetiousness in other words, of laddishness, says Tony Thorne, a linguist and cultural historian. What you might think of as banter now is rooted in that tradition.

That tradition first lashed itself to banters mast in the early 1990s, and controversy soon followed. In June 1992, a Guardian story headlined Police fire sex banter officer, about the dismissal of a sergeant for sexual harassment, recorded an early skirmish in the modern banter wars, and an important new layer to its meaning in the wild: The move is seen as part of the Metropolitan polices desire to reassure women officers that what has previously been tolerated as banter is no longer acceptable. Two years later, the lads mags arrived.

The first edition of Loaded magazine appeared in May 1994, with a picture of Gary Oldman on the front smoking a dog-end, under a banner that declared him a super lad. What fresh lunacy is this? the editors note read. Loaded is a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters Loaded is for the man who believes he can do anything, if only he wasnt hungover.

If banter dismays you, James Brown, the magazines first editor, is quite an easy bogeyman. As he acknowledges himself, he created a title that defined a genre. Loaded was swiftly recognised as a foundational text for a resurgent and ebullient masculinity that had been searching for public expression. While it was always overtly horny, the magazine was initially more interested in a forlorn, slackjawed and self-ironising appreciation of A-listers (one reversible poster had Cindy Crawford on one side and a steam train on the other) than the grot-plus-football formula that successors and imitators like Maxim, Zoo and Nuts milked to destruction. But it also flirted with something murkier.

To its critics, Loaded and its imitators aimed to sanitise a certain hooliganistic worldview with a strategic disclaimer. Banter emerges as this relentless gloss of irony over everything, said Bethan Benwell, senior lecturer in language and linguistics at the University of Stirling and the author of several papers on mens magazines. The constant excusing of sexist or homophobic sentiments with this wink that says you dont really mean it. Benwell pointed to Loadeds emblematic strapline: For men who should know better.

Brown denies that his magazine invented banter. Instead, he says, it captured a zeitgeist that the media had previously failed to acknowledge; the folk culture that Tony Thorne refers to, brought out into the open. Before Browns intervention, GQ had run John Major and Michael Heseltine as cover stars, for Gods sake. I took the interests and the outlook of the young men that I knew, and I put them in a magazine, Brown said. Im not responsible for the tone of the later entrants to the market. We were criticised because we fancied women, not because we belittled them.

The thing about Loaded was that the way we wrote reflected the way we were with our mates, he went on. Theres definitely a thing that exists in the male outlook: you take the piss out of the people you like, and you ignore the people you dont.

Accept this as your starting point, and objections become exhausting to sustain: what youre objecting to is an act of affection. Of course, this is what makes it insidious. Because Browns account rests on the intention behind the magazine, and Benwells on the effect it had, they are impossible to reconcile. Its a very difficult thing to resist or challenge without looking like the stereotypical humourless feminist, said Benwell. But by laughing, you become complicit.

Loaded gave this new kind of banter escape velocity, and it began to colonise other worlds. On BBC2, for example, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were staking out their own territory with Fantasy Football League, a mixture of sketches and celebrity chat that managed to be enthusiastic and satirical at the same time, and reached its peak when the pair became national icons, thanks to their Euro 96 anthem, Three Lions. While a long-running joke about the Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lees pineapple haircut seems flatly racist in retrospect Baddiel did an impression of him in blackface by and large, the tone was milder and more conventional than the magazines were: this was the sensibility of the university graduate slumming it before embarking on grown-up life.

Baddiel implied that laddism could easily occupy a spectrum from ogling to literature, drawing a line to Nick Hornbys memoir of life as an Arsenal fan, Fever Pitch. Hornby once said to me that all this stuff you know, fantasy football and his book is men talking about things that they like and for a while in the mid-80s they werent allowed to, he said in 1995. Ive always liked football and Ive always liked naked women, and its easier to talk about that now than it was eight years ago. Those comments reflect a kind of sneer at its critics that you could often detect in Fantasy Football League, even as its hosts protested that they were just having a laugh though Baddiel himself denies that view. Twenty years on, he, like Brown, is at pains to draw a line between the approach that he and Skinner popularised, and the forms that came later. I guess me and Frank did specialise in banter, he said in an email. In a time before it was known as bantz.

Over the next 10 years, two things happened that ushered in the age of banter. (You might call it mature banter, except that its also the opposite.) First, instead of just being a thing that happened, it became a thing that people talked about. Then, as it became a more tangible cultural product, everyone started trying to make money out of it. The watershed moment, the forms equivalent to Dylan going electric, was the invention of Dave.

Like most good ideas, it looks simple enough in retrospect. Before Dave was Dave, it was UKTV Gold 2. The predecessor channels audience share was 0.761%, and no one could tell who on earth it was supposed to be for. But we had the content, says Steve North, the channels brand manager in 2007 and content of a particular kind that the existing name did very little to communicate: Have I Got News for You, They Think Its All Over, Top Gear. Viewers said they loved the repartee, the humour. It reminded them of spending time with their funniest friends.

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

The target audience was highly specific. It was men married or in relationships, maybe with young children, not going to the pub as much as they used to, says Andy Bryant, managing director of Red Bee, the agency brought in to work on the rebrand. And they missed that camaraderie.

Their purpose thus fixed, North started to run brainstorming sessions at which people would shout out suggestions for the name. One of the ones we collected was Dave, he says. We thought, great, but we cant call it that. But then we thought, Its a surrogate friend. If the audience really sees it as that, if they see it as genuinely providing the banter, maybe we can really give it a name.

They put their hunch through its paces. The market research company YouGov was commissioned to test Dave alongside a bunch of other names (Matthew and Kevin were also on the shortlist), but nothing else had the same everyman resonance. For us, Dave is a sensibility, a place, an emotion, a feeling, said North, his tone thoughtful, almost gnomic. Everyone has their own sense of who Dave is, thats the important thing. Its hard to find anyone who doesnt know someone called Dave.

Now the channel had a brand, it needed a slogan. Lots of people claim they played a part in the naming, says Bryant. But it was just as important to encapsulate what the channel was all about. And at some point someone, I dont know who, wrote it on a board: The home of witty banter. The rebrand added 8m new viewers in six months; Dave saw a 71% increase in its target audience of affluent young men.

Conceived by the first generation of senior professionals to have grown up with banter as an unremarkable part of their demographics cultural mix, the channel crystallised a change, and accelerated it. In 2006, The Ricky Gervais Show, in which Gervais and Stephen Merchant relentlessly poked fun at their in-house idiot savant Karl Pilkington, became the most popular podcast of all time. In 2007, the year of Daves rebrand, Top Gears ratings shot from below 5m to a record high of 8m. The following year, QI moved from BBC4 to BBC2. (A tie-in book published the same year, QI: Advanced Banter, sold more than 125,000 copies.)

North saw the kind of fraternal teasing that was being monetised by his channel, and the panel shows that were its lifeblood, as fundamentally benign. The key thing is that its two-way, he said. Its about two people riffing off each other.

But like his 20th-century forebears, he can see that something ugly has evolved, and he wants to keep his brand well away from it. Bants, he said with distaste. That thing of cover for dubious behaviour we hate and despise it massively. When we launched, it was about fun, being light-hearted, maybe pushing each other without being disrespectful. When people talk about Ive had a go at that person, great banter no, thats just nasty.

By the turn of the decade,as other branding agencies mimicked the success of Dave, banter was everywhere, a folk tradition that had acquired a peculiar sort of respectability. The men who celebrated it werent just lads in the pub any more: they had spending power and establishment allies on their side. But they were, by the same token, more visible to critics. Aggression from an underdog can be overlooked; aggression from the establishment is serious enough to become a matter of public concern.

Take Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Sky Sports brand-defining football presenters, who got themselves up to their necks in some extremely bad banter in 2011. Keys blamed dark forces, but everyone else blamed him and Gray for being misogynists. We knew this because there was footage.

The firestorm, as Keys called it, centred on claims that the two men had said and done heinously sexist things off-air. Most memorable, at least for its phrase-making, was the clip in which Keys eagerly asked his fellow pundit Jamie Redknapp if hed smashed it it being a woman and asserted that he could often be found hanging out the back of it.

Gray went quickly. In the days before he followed, Keys burned hot with injustice in a series of mea-sorta-culpas, particularly focused on the tape in which he expressed his derision at the idea that a woman, Sian Massey-Ellis, could be an assistant referee in the Premier League.

It was just banter, he said. Or, more exactly, just a bit of banter, as he said Massey-Ellis had assured him she understood in a later telephone conversation in which, he added, much banter passed between us. She and I enjoyed some banter, he protested. It was lads-mag banter, he insisted. It was stone-age banter, he admitted. We liked to have banter, he explained. Richard Keys was sorry if you were offended, but also, it wasnt his fault if you didnt get it. It was just banter, for goodness sake!

Up to their necks in some extremely bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Keys insistence that his mistake was simply a failure to move with the times was nothing new: banter has always seemed to carry a longing for the past, for an imagined era before male friendship was so cramped by the tiresome obligations of feminist scrutiny. But while his underlying views were painfully dated, his conception of banter was entirely modern: a sly expansion of the words meaning, and a self-conscious contention that it provided an impregnable defence.

The Keys variation understood banter, first, as a catch-all means of denying responsibility if anyone was hurt; and, second, as a means of reinforcing a bond between two people by being cruel about a third. The comparison wouldnt please a couple of alphas like Keys and Gray, but both strategies brought it closer to a style of communication with classically feminine associations: gossip. Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch (lol) Professor in Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that the two modes of interaction follow basically the same structure. People gossip as a trust game, she said. You tell someone your unsayable private secret, and it bonds you closer together. Theyre supposed to reciprocate with a confidence of their own. Well, banter works in the same way now. You say something outrageous, and you see if the other person dares to top your remark.

The trust game in banter was traditionally supposed to be: do you trust me when I say were friends in spite of the mean things Im saying about you? But now theres a second version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean things Im saying about other people? I think originally it was a harmless thing, said Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an archive of male group conversation, mostly recorded by her students, that goes back to the 1980s. But then it started to be used as an excuse when men were caught out engaging in forms of it that werent so harmless.

It comes down to context and intent, says the comedian Bridget Christie. The gentler form of banter is still knocking around, she suggested, but now it exists alongside something darker: I found The Inbetweeners adolescent banter hilarious, because it was equal and unthreatening. But there is obviously a world of difference between a group of teenage boys benignly taking the piss out of each other, and a bigot being racist or misogynist and trying to pass it off as a joke.

Trace the rise of banter, and you will find that it corresponds to the rise of political correctness or, anyway, to the backlash against political correctness gone mad. That phrase and just banter mirror each other perfectly: one denoting a priggish culture that is deemed to have overreached, the other a laid-back culture that is deemed to have been unfairly reined in. Ironically enough, just banter does exactly what it accuses political correctness of, seeking to close down discussion by telling you that meaning is settled by category rather than content. Political correctness asserts that a racist joke is primarily racist, whereas banter asserts that a racist joke is primarily a joke. In the past, the men who used it rarely had to define it, or to explain themselves to anybody else. Today, in contrast, it is named all the time. The biggest change isnt the banter itself, says Bethan Benwell. Its the explicit use of the word as a disclaimer.

By sheer repetition and by its use as an unanswerable defence, banter has turned from an abstraction into a vast and calcified description of actions as well as words: gone from a way of talking to a way of life, a style that accidentally became a worldview. He bantered you, people sometimes say: you always used to banter with your mates, but now it often sounds like something you do to them. Once it was directionless, inconclusive chatter with wit as the engine that drove it, said the comedian Russell Kane. Now, if I trip you up, thats banter.

You might think the humiliation suffered by Keys and Gray would have made banter less appealing as a get-out, but not a bit of it. Banter, increasingly, seems like the first refuge of the inexcusable. In 2014, Malky Mackay, who had been fired as manager of Cardiff City Football Club a year earlier, was caught having sent texts that referred to Chinese people eating dogs, black people being criminals, Jewish people being avaricious, and gay people being snakes all of which were initially optimistically defended by the League Managers Association as letting off steam to a friend during some friendly text message banter. The comedian Dapper Laughs, whose real name is Daniel OReilly, established himself as banters rat king, with his very own ITV2 show, and then lost it after he suggested that an audience member at one of his gigs was gagging for a rape. A man was convicted of murder after he crushed his friend against a wall with a Jeep Cherokee after an argument over badger-baiting, a course of action that he said had been intended as banter. Another slashed the throat of someone he had met in a pub and described the incident as a moment of banter after 14 or 15 pints. Both are now in prison.

By any sane measure,banter was falling into disrepute, as often a disguise for malice as a word for the ribaldry of lads on the lash. Still it did not go away: instead, the worst of it has mutated again, asserting its authority in public and saving its creepiest tendencies for the shadows or, at least, for the company of five, or 10, or 20 of your closest mates.

At the London School of Economics, it started with a leaflet. Each year at the universitys freshers fair, LSE Rugby Football Club distributed a banterous primer on rugby culture. In October 2014, says the then-president of the student union, Nona Buckley-Irvine, a student came to her in tears with a copy in her hand. The leaflet talked about trollops, slags, crumpet, mingers, and the desirability of misogyny; there were passing references to the horrors of homosexual humiliation and outright homosexual debauchery. Anyone charmed by all this was invited to sign up for the club and join the banter list, entitling them to participate in the exchange of chappish email conversation.

To anyone with a passing knowledge of university laddism, it was hard to imagine a more ordinary iteration. Still, after the unreconstructed chappishness of the leaflet came to light, the club knew it had a problem. It issued a collective apology acknowledging that we have a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter, and promised to organise a workshop. But there was reason to be sceptical about the depth of that commitment.

When Buckley-Irvine and her colleagues published a report on the incident, they noted a string of others, including an antisemitic assault on a university ski trip to Val dIsere in 2011. And there were other indiscretions it didnt mention. According to two people who were present, one club dinner at an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane ended with a stripper having bottles thrown at her when, already intimidated, she refused to take her clothes off. She hid in the toilet, and had to be escorted out by a member of staff as the team vandalised the restaurant.

Photograph: Alamy

According to five people who were either members of the rugby club or closely associated with it, one notorious senior member was widely thought to be responsible for the leaflet. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) But when they came to defend themselves to the student union, members of the club fell back on one of the most revered pillars of laddism: all for one, one for all. Theyd clearly worked out a line, says Nona Buckley-Irvine. No one individual was responsible. They were sorry. It was just banter. Thats what they all said.

The accountancy firm KPMG, which sponsored the universitys wider Athletics Union, decided that banter was not an especially helpful brand association, and withdrew funding worth 22,000. The students union decided to disband the club for the academic year. The decision moved some observers to disgust. It was a gross overreaction, a former team member told me. We were the best-behaved team when it came to actually playing rugby but they banned that bit and they couldnt ban any of the rest.

Others took a less measured tone. I had old members emailing me and calling me a fascist, says Buckley-Irvine. Asking me if I didnt understand that it was just banter. Rugby players chanted abuse at her on nights out, she told me. They shoulder-barged her, and called her a cunt.

These kinds of interactions would tend to take place on Wednesdays, also known as sports night, at a bar in Leicester Square. Sports night was the apotheosis of the rugby clubs bleak solidarity. In deference to what you might call the wingers-before-mingers code, for instance, members of the club who were expected to dress in suits werent allowed to speak to women before 9pm. So they would just shout abuse instead, one female former student, who Ill call Anna, remembered. One chant, she said, went, Nine nos and a yes is a yes. At the time, Anna thought that it was all a joke. People would say, Its just banter all the time. After everything. Absolutely everything, she said, sitting in a cafe in south London. If you were meeting someone new, saying they had good banter, that was a pretty high compliment. Whereas if you dont go along with that stuff, its seen as, you cant take the chat, you cant take the banter. And its not seen as having a stance against it. Its seen as not being able to keep up.

After the rugby club was disbanded, nothing much changed in sports night social life. Many members of the club still went on the same nights out; they just colonised other teams. They still addressed girls as Sarah 2 or Sarah 8 depending on how attractive they considered them out of 10; they still had shouted conversations about their sex lives in front of the women they had slept with but refused to acknowledge.

That culture was not confined to Wednesday nights. Anna remembers a guy who took her picture as she slept, naked, in the bed they were sharing, and circulated it to another non-university sports team via WhatsApp. She wasnt meant to see it on his phone.

Ask anyone well-informed where banter resides now, and theyll give the same answer: WhatsApp groups and email threads, the safe spaces of the lad class. What youd get out of those WhatsApp threads, its another world of drama, one former member of the football club said. The details of girls bodies that youd read, a few funny jibes, that was the limit for me. But when it moved on to, like, really, really bad stuff, always about sex it was too much. Those threads are the source of everything.

If the threads were an outlet, they were by no means the limit. Banter, by common consent, wasnt confined to mocking each other: it was about action. If you dressed up for a night out, one female student remembered, it was just kind of status quo that you could have your arse grabbed. It was just like, Oh, that was kind of weird, but OK, thatll happen. Like everyone else willing to speak about it, her view of that culture was perplexingly nuanced, sometimes contradictory. It sounds scary, she said, but that being said, some of my best nights were there, and like it was fun. But then she said: What was defined as serious just got so pushed. I think for someone to lodge a complaint they would have to be actually hurt.

Anna remembers lots of sketchy incidents. She recalls nights when her choices faded into a blur, and she wondered if she had really been in control. But at the time, I would never call it out, she said. And then, youre all living in halls together, and the next day, its like: What did you do last night? Thats hilarious. Thats banter.

When Anna thinks about the behaviour of some of the men she knew at university, she finds it hard to pin down exactly what she thinks of them. Theres one in particular who sticks in her mind. On a Wednesday night, he was a banter guy, she said. He was a Wednesday animal. But the rest of the time, he was my friend.

Controversial though all this was at the time, no one seems to think that it will have cost the perpetrators much. Ive tried so hard to leave all that behind, said the former member of the football team. But those guys theyre all going on to run banks, or the country, or whatever. The senior rugby man who many held responsible, by the way, has landed on his feet. Today, he has a job at KPMG.

In 2017, every new instance of banter is immediately spotted and put through the journalistic wringer. (Vices Joel Golby, who wrote the definitive text on the bagel thing, has made a career from his exquisite close readings of the form.) But when each new absolute legend emerges, we dont usually have the context to make the essential judgment: do the proponents tend towards the harmless warmth of Ellis and his mates, or the frank hostility of the LSE rugby boys? Is their love of irony straightforward, or a mask for something else?

As Richard Keys and Dapper Laughs and their cohorts have polluted the idea of banter, the commercial entities that endorsed its rise have become uneasy with the label. They wanted it to go viral; they hadnt expected it to go postal. Dave, for example, has dropped the home of witty banter slogan. Its not about classic male humour any more, its a little bit smarter, says UKTVs Steve North. We definitely say it less than we used to.

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Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/02/the-age-of-banter/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/the-age-of-banter/

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Emily Parzybok

FollowBased in Seattle. Always trying to get abroad. Bibliophile. Northwesterner. World Traveller. Foodie. Yogini. Political Hack. Tea Drinker. Proud Cat Lady.3 days agoOn Solitude: Westward to Japan

I’m currently making my way westward on a 6-month circumnavigation of the globe. This piece is the first in a series of musings from the journey. They’re informed by place — though more reflection piece than travelogue. You can find photos from the trip on Facebook and Instagram using #ParzyWalk

I started my journey seeking solitude.

I started out from San Francisco and arrived in Tokyo sleep deprived gazing into the frigid sea out of the flight window on a crystalline day. The airport in San Francisco had been the easy part. I’d rolled through the motions, checking in at the China Airlines counter before shuffling through security amidst a crowd of international travelers bound for various home parts, catching snippets of conversation in a collage of languages to their family members in tow. I’d purchased a sparkling water to rid myself of the final quarters and dimes in my wallet and then stood in the impossibly long line to board my flight.

I like the motion of traveling. Sometimes I think my favorite part comes in navigating a crowded station, finding the flow of winding through a new terminal. In the daily motion of travel, there’s both anonymity and constant distraction. It’s the comfort of movement, the sense of blending in on public transit — headphones in, lost in thought — married to the novelty of new places. In SFO’s international terminal, I found a rhythm. I skipped the walking ramps and power walked myself to my flight out of the country. But as soon as I boarded the plane, settled my backpack underneath the seat in front of me, unlaced my hiking boots and leaned back, my mind turned on. I felt the panic creep.

The flight suddenly felt less like a passage to Japan and more like the abandonment of the life I’d carefully constructed for myself. And why was I leaving anyway? For months, I’d wrestled with the instinct to depart, to leave behind the comfort of my daily life. I hadn’t been able to work out why I want to abandon the things that bring me the most joy: my work, my partner, my pets, my hometown.

Sitting on the plane, spinning into anxiety, I reminded myself of advice a stranger had given me when I told her about my upcoming trip. She said, “I did something like this once. I knew I was turning my life upside down. But I just…” and then she mimicked holding her nose, squeezed her eyes shut tight and jumped.

Many times on this journey already, I’ve taken a deep breath as if to plunge into some unknown water. I took one walking into the chaotic Chinese rail station in Chengdu to buy an overnight ticket using sign language. I took one walking to a guesthouse, alone at night, down an unlit dirt road in rural Laos where the public bus deposited me without further instruction. And I took one sitting on that first flight contemplating the leap I was about to take.

A few minutes into the flight, I slipped into the airplane bathroom and turned to my reflection in the full length mirror. The veins in my cheeks reflected back a dull rust tone in the viridescent neon light and the wrinkle across my forehead splayed dark and shadowed, crowning my face. I like the slow appearance of wrinkles. It gives my face the look of being lived in, and I enjoy the enduring shadow of wonder written into my brow. As the tears started to pour down my face, I had a little talk with me. I reminded the woman standing in front of me that I am here for her, that she is my favorite person, that I am her best friend and that she can do this thing alone. Following my self-directed pep talk in the dimly lit capsule, I walked back to my seat, sat down and gazed at the miniature plane on my screen, venturing over open sea.

One of the first questions most people ask when you tell them you’re going on a trip is, “Alone?” It’s less a query and more a means of expressing their disapproval. Women should not travel alone. If we do, we should expect terrible things to befall us at every turn. Folks range from mild disbelief to personal affront.

There’s a particular kind of cynicism at play here that troubles me. Our fear of foreign places is ultimately a fear of foreign people — in particular, the kind that don’t look like us. Here, I’ve learned paternalism is alive and well. Folks are particularly worried about my safety in Muslim countries. White men have a really intense fear of brown men touching me. I’m not exaggerating when I say this. Nearly to a person, white men (particularly those in generations above me) have warned me about rape — some going as far as saying I’m asking for it.

Let me just take a quick moment to say: I’m fucking sick of being condescendingly warned about men by men. PSA for the men reading this: women know men are dangerous better than you will ever understand. You don’t have to explain it to us.

In a cafe in Luang Prabang, an older gentleman in John Lennon glasses and white linen pants bristled over his pho when he learned I was traveling by myself and then preceded to tell me that I should not travel alone and that the place I was in wasn’t safe. He was warning me about the people he lives alongside every day. They’re far from being his community despite proximity. And that distance — or rather, lack of it — is why this fear is so insidious. Fear of place inhibits our connection to people, limits our ability to empathize, and creates narratives in which those who are foreign to us become enemies of ours. When people question whether it’s safe to travel alone to a particular place, what they are actually questioning is whether or not it’s safe to interface and connect with the people in that place. There’s a mistrust of others coupled with a disbelief that I would want to confront a hostile world solo.

At a Christmas party the week before I departed, I was having the standard conversation. Yes, I’m going on a long trip. Yes, I’m going alone.

We were just heading into the series of ‘Alone? Are you sure about that? Shouldn’t you go with someone? I don’t think you should do that. You don’t understand how [insert country here] is. That’s just not a good idea.’ when the woman standing next to me interrupted my conversation partner.

“If she’s going on this trip alone, perhaps she wants a journey by herself. She chose this; she must have a reason.”

I set out seeking solitude, but I encountered loneliness first.

A partnership of many years becomes the water you swim in. In love, I lost my talent for being alone. The first few days in Japan were jarring. I felt as though I was looking at the place from underwater. Nausea made my eyes blurry. Worry turned a dimmer on the sky. I went through the motions of enjoying sumptuous dinners at ryokans in a fog. I got in the shower at night and sat down and wept, biting my knee to quiet the sound. I was incensed at how quickly the thing I spent years building could seemingly vanish. It was like absently tugging a stray thread on my favorite sweater one day and finding myself standing naked in the cold. Love unraveled in a flash.

But, although striking out on my own made me feel suddenly exposed, it’s also true that loneliness doesn’t merely happen when you’re alone. Loneliness can occur in a crowd, in a relationship, or even while traveling with someone. There is nothing so acute as the loneliness of crying yourself to sleep next to a gently snoring partner who has swiftly drifted off to sleep after a fight. It’s far less lonely to spend the night by yourself.

In planning my trip, I thought I would be relieved to have a travel buddy those first few weeks in Japan, but many times over, I discovered that the presence of someone else only amplified how desperately lonely I felt. Each morning, I dutifully pulled on my personality like a well-worn sweater. Being in relationship with others, friends and lovers alike, fundamentally requires the presentation of a certain version of ourselves. Whether we’re navigating with a travel companion, or navigating a long term relationship, we shape our self in accordance with another. And often this requires that we show up less than authentically in the interest of social nicety, particularly when it comes to negative emotions. Mourning and confusion, after all, make people uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s best to be alone when you’re lost.

At times, Japan made it easy to be lonely. Respect and decorum — designed to maintain appropriate interpersonal contact — felt like an enclosure. Navigating new social interactions insisted on a bifurcation of feelings and outward expression, on politeness married with restraint. Given my state of mind, perhaps I should have embraced this happy divide, but the insistence on propriety only magnified my loneliness. On trains, people around me stared into their phones. Those walking in parks looked the opposite way as we crossed paths. The people ringing me up for coffee studiously avoided my gaze. I missed eye contact. In Japan, I ached to be looked at, to be seen.

When we set out to new places alone, we invite the companionship of the individuals in those places more readily. When we travel, we can easily put ourselves in the way of interactions that challenge our assumptions, ideas that reframe our very sense of self. The cynicism I’ve encountered so many times with this question of “alone?” is the flip side to the open vulnerability of encounter. In the act of venturing out, there’s an inherent hopefulness and belief in connectivity. This seems particularly relevant given America’s current political climate.

But encountering others with empathetic curiosity requires that we first meet ourselves with that attitude. I have spent a bulk of my life contemplating my relationships with other people and less time laboring on my relationship with myself. This was the ultimate intention of my journey. My therapist reminded me time and again as I agonized over the decision to leave, “This is your time. You with you.”

Loneliness, then, is an opportunity to practice reacquainting with our self. Loneliness is the forge for self-reliance and self-relation. It’s the practice of learning to be with oneself in discomfort. Only through meeting ourselves in the potentially painful space of loneliness can we arrive in the peaceful realm of solitude. Loneliness is the sentiment of fear, of thinking we are not enough, and of thinking that we’re fundamentally disconnected from humanity at large. Solitude is where the faith in connectivity and the hope of connection converge. And I finally started to find that faith and hope on my last day in Japan, biking perfectly by myself down a quiet street in Kyoto with my best friend from the mirror.

Travel

Japan

Loneliness

Solitude

Self-awareness

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